Fair Districts Florida- An ACORN Front Group That’s Anything but “Fair”

[Patricia M. McBride]

Just seems to never end. First Amendment 4 being promoted by Sierra Foundation and now this backed by Acorn. The Ultra liberals are doing a power grab on our state, and let's hope we are smarter and don't let this get started. Certainly makes me really wonder about the supreme court judges who stopped amendment 7 now.

October 4, 2010 Florida Review 3 Comments

Fair Districts Florida is the organization sponsoring Amendments 5 and 6, having obtained enough signatures to place these amendments on the November ballot; and it also identifies itself as a “non-partisan” organization. The stated goals of these two amendments are to establish “constitutionally mandated fairness standards” to determine the way Florida draws legislative and congressional district lines by drawing ‘compact’ and ‘contiguous’ districts that allegedly don’t advantage incumbents or political parties. Its rabid supporters want the public to believe that that if Amendments 5 and 6 were approved, legislative and congressional districts will somehow not be drawn to favor or disfavor any political party or incumbent.

But let’s be real, please. While the concept of “fair” districts may sound appealing to voters on the surface, all these claims begin to completely unravel under just the slightest bit of scrutiny. First off, Fair Districts Florida was started in 2007 with $25,000 of seed money from none other than ACORN- yes, that same ACORN criminal enterprise that was busted for tax fraud and prostitution last year. The organization also has a clear partisan bias, no matter what Ellen Freidin, its leader and activist progressive Democrat says. The “bipartisan” organization is made up of a bunch of progressive liberals and a couple of Republicans who have been named “honorary co-chairs”- read people who lent their names but not their time to actually research the merits of this cause.

The quest to make legislative districts more “fair” would have much more credibility if Fair Districts Florida sought to draw districts using county & city lines, waterways, or roadways as legislative boundaries, but they’re not. The fact is that Florida’s population mostly follows the coastline, and the lines for counties and cities were drawn long before substantial numbers of people began moving into them. And since our state’s geography is irregular, intra-state mobility is substantial, and Democrat voting blocks are tightly compacted, there is no way for “fairer” districts to be drawn as Fair Districts Florida promotes them.

Researchers recently ran several detailed analyses of Florida electoral results using numerous computer-drawn districts. The results are those which Fair Districts Florida would prefer you ignore.

From the Orlando Sentinel-

Earlier this month, researchers from Stanford University and the University of Michigan presented a yearlong study of where Florida voters live that ran thousands of complex simulations of elections in computer-drawn contiguous and compact districts.

Their models found that even using maps drawn by nonpolitical algorithms, Republicans would still win 59 percent of all the districts.

That’s basically because more Democratic voters live in concentrated clusters in urban cores, while Republican voters are spread out along the suburban and exurban landscape, they concluded.

“Their [Democrats'] larger problem is with the extreme concentration of support in cities, and the constitutional reforms will … not help them there,” said Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford who presented the research with University of Michigan professor Jowei Chen at the American Political Science Association annual conference in Washington, D.C..

“In order to achieve a ‘fair’ translation of votes to seats, the Democrats would need to draw very non-compact wedge-shaped districts starting in downtown Miami and reaching out into the suburbs,” Rodden said.

It’s clear that Fair Districts Florida isn’t about “fairness”, it’s about liberals and progressives being more able to successfully enact their agenda in Tallahassee.

Conveniently, Fair Districts Florida has not shown any examples of exactly what a “fair” district looks like, otherwise their partisan motives would be on full display. Fair Districts Florida would simply create more of the same oddly shaped districts that simply benefit Democrats to the maximum extent possible, which brings us to the truth about “fair” districts- redistricting is all about politics and power, as it always has been since the beginning of the country. But this time, it will be the courts drawing “fair” districts instead of the legislature. Funny how no one complained for decades when Democrats drew the state’s districts, but now that they’re out of power in the state, “fairness” all of a sudden becomes a priority. Were either of these amendments to pass, or if Alex Sink were to win the Governorship, ACORN’s corrupted influence will have a substantial say in Florida’s redistricting. Vote No on both of these amendments, and tell Janet Reno that Mickey Mouse shouldn’t be registered to vote for Alan Grayson in Congressional District 8.

link: http://shark-tank.net/2010/10/04/fair-districts-florida-acorn-front...