Linda Mann wrote, "My feeling is that the composition of the
redistricting commission was fundamentally flawed. I know people have
already talked about how non representative it was, but I am wondering if it
also wasn't legally invalid as well. One would have to do some research on
what the legal requirements are. Well, I guess I could research it but does
anyone else have any thoughts on this?"
I was thinking along the same lines back when the Charter Commission
appointed the Redistricting Commission, and began doing a little research.
The results were disappointing, but here is where I got:
First, there may have been a technical violation in the lists that
the Charter Commission considered from the the political parties. The
Charter provides that "each party list shall contain at least six, but not
more than ten, names of persons broadly representative of the city
population." The DFL Party dutifully nominated ten candidates who were, as
best as we could manage, "broadly representative of the city population":
our list included members from eight wards, five women and five men, three
members of racial minorities, and three openly gay or lesbian members. And
while the Charter Commission did appoint one member from this list as
required, they bypassed the rest of the list and instead appointed a second
DFLer from the same ward as the first member.
The technical violation was that the Charter Commission considered
another political party's list with only four nominees. That party
originally nominated six members, but two withdrew, and as far as I know the
Charter Commission did not seek any additional nominations in order to bring
the list into compliance with the Charter. Now, if the other parties had
been interested in manipulating the process, they could have submitted six
names, then let four or five withdraw--thus forcing the Charter Commission
into appointing the nominees that the party preferred for the party's own
reasons, rather than the nominees that the Charter Commission preferred for
its own reasons.
I don't hold out much hope here, though. This violation is pretty
technical. I have no reason to think that it resulted from intentional
manipulation, rather than from the two nominees just changing their minds
about their interest in serving; the DFL Party spent weeks putting together
a good, diverse list, and there was no shortage of nominees (I turned
volunteers away in order to keep the list to ten), but maybe the other party
was working under different constraints or finding less success in
recruiting volunteers. More to the point, there is no way of knowing that
the Charter Commission would not have appointed the same nominee if the
party had supplied two extra names at the last minute.
Second, there is a policy-based argument that the Charter Commission
ignored the Charter's clear intent in appointing such a shockingly
unbalanced Redistricting Commission. The Charter provides that "each party
list shall contain . . . names of persons broadly representative of the city
population. . . . Each party list shall include persons from groups
traditionally under represented in city government, including racial
minorities." The latter sentence evidences a clear intent in favor of at
least racial diversity, and the former sentence suggests other kinds of
diversity as well. Yet the Charter Commission appointed a Redistricting
Commission that dramatically underrepresented women and minorities (only one
of each on a ten-member body), and totally excluded eight out of thirteen
wards.
This argument, too, has its flaws. The Charter's explicit wording is
directed only to the parties, not to the Charter Commission itself, and the
parties probably complied. Now I would not want to be the Charter
Commission's attorney, arguing that the Charter Commission was free to
ignore diversity as it did, but that argument does have technical merit. (I
would be interested in hearing the Charter Commission's explanation for the
Redistricting Commission's dramatic unrepresentativeness.)
Third, there is a constitutional argument that a racially, sexually,
and geographically unrepresentative body denies "the equal protection of the
laws" to the underrepresented communities. This argument is the front-end
mirror of the voting-rights claim on which most criticism of the
redistricting plan has focused: instead of claiming that the result is
unfair, this argument says that the process was unfair and thus inherently
taints the result regardless of whether the result is itself unfair.
There are surely other process-oriented arguments as well.
The Charter's redistricting process appears in chapter 1, section
3(B). The Charter is available online at
http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/cityhall/laws/charter/.
BRM
Brian Melendez
St. Anthony West (Ward 3)
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