Yes We're Disappointed

By Kelli Lundgren

To the press, the public, and the Legislative Redistricting Committee: Yes, members of RepresentMeUtah! are very disappointed in Utah's redistricting final maps. But we are not surprised.

Following this process has been eye-opening to our optimistic agenda. This is what we've learned:

1. Redistricting is performed by elected officials to protect themselves and political agendas, and, in Utah, to tighten up the one-party rule while the other party looks on. "Leaders choosing voters" still applies to Utah's process in 2011. Even the press analyzes the process in terms of its affect on incumbents. Most of Utah's citizens already gave up on fairness years ago, except for thirty or so of us "Don Quixote-types."

2. Pertaining to RepresentMeUtah!'s repeated requests to keep communities together: Are we insane? Probably. Ignored? Definitely. Of course gerrymandering had to be performed to protect Republican incumbents, candidates and agendas. Republican committee members discarded fair submitted maps because they minimized community, city and county divides without consideration for incumbents.

3. Damn legal system. The Legislative redistricting committee fortunately had to listen to citizen and local leader requests to keep Rose Park, Glendale, and basically northwest Salt Lake County together after proposing to dilute portions of the common interest community into the boundaries of a favored Republican incumbent in North Salt Lake. Good for citizens. Bad for Republicans. The Republican legislators had to accommodate keeping the community together to protect themselves from a lawsuit on the subject.

4. Damn legal system, again. New proposed committee boundaries divide grocery store parking lots, city blocks, etc. because one-person-one-vote tolerances need to get down to one or zero persons. If they don't, in a lawsuit, a judge may otherwise pick Fair Boundaries' "down to zero" map that only protects city and county boundaries, instead of incumbents and political agendas.

5. I think that when my dog does his duty in our backyard he is temporarily in another House district. My city, Cottonwood Heights, is divided into two U.S. Congressional Districts, two Utah Senate Districts, and three House Districts.

6. It would be naive of anyone to believe that Republicans on the Legislative Redistricting Committee did not use voting history to dilute the 1.05 million diverse votes in Salt Lake County into other urban and rural counties on the U.S. Congressional maps. We actually saw one pizza slice map that remarkably diluted Democratic votes across the board into Republican votes and showed the stats. The map and its analysis had to be removed from consideration because of legal implication, but similar maps are still in the running for the final cut.

7. 53% of the public wanted the doughnut hole approach (Salt Lake Tribune). The plea was ignored. RepresentMeUtah! even analyzed the committee's "translated" meeting notes from public meetings around the state, that even after remarks were watered-down for legal reasons, we found 67% of public and city leader comments were pleas in favor of the doughnut hole approach, dividing urban and rural.

8. Yes, we have a plan to continue our fight for fairness and democracy.

9. By the way, many of the six remaining U.S. Congressional maps now split Utah County East to West... it must be for another Tea Party candidate to proclaim their candidacy. Sandstrom or Herrod, perhaps? Don't be surprised. Republicans leading the legislative redistricting committee "sacrificed a House district" and put both men in one. There is probably method to their sacrifice.

10. An independent commission that does not protect incumbents needs to be pursued. This current redistricting process is the biggest slight to democracy in all states, but in Utah in particular, where one party rules and the other looks on. Utah's majority party continues to strengthen its rule through redistricting by picking its voters.

11. This process is one big gerrymander; one further disenfranchisement of voters, one further dilution of undesired votes by Republicans. Stay tuned to the Wall Street Journal as I suspect it will use Utah once again in 2011 as its excellent example of redistricting's disenfranchisement of voters.

12. Yes, RepresentMeUtah! members are disappointed, but we're not naive. I can only guess we all have some type of optimist gene that says we can do something to improve the process.

13. However, there's still a lot of potential, perhaps even legally. And of course, if we can somehow stir the emotions of 1.2 million Democratic and Independent voters to get out and vote next year, we may be able to counter the Republican gerrymander, and eventually blow these boundaries right out of my backyard.

Kelli Lundgren