Testimony of
Patrick Murray
Monmouth University Polling Institute
New Jersey Senate
Committee on State
Government, Wagering, Tourism & Historic Preservation
January 7, 2016
Re SCR188 (proposed constitutional changes to legislative apportionment
process)
Mr. Chairman, Madame Vice-Chairwoman and members of the
committee:
I am Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University
Polling Institute. Although I have been
known, from time to time, to comment on the efficacy and responsiveness of the
internal workings of state government in New Jersey, I rarely take a public position
on a piece of legislation. When I do it
is largely because the process by which the legislation was drawn up does not
adhere to principles of good government.
It is for this reason that I appear before you today to
express my strong opposition to SCR 188.
This proposed Constitutional amendment will not achieve its
stated aim of designing a fair legislative map with at least ten competitive
districts.
Furthermore, the wording of the ballot question and
interpretive statement seems to be deliberately designed to fool New Jersey
voters into supporting a Constitutional change against their own interests.
First, let me say that I endorse the provisions that call
for the immediate appointment of the public member or the Apportionment
Commission and that codify a public access process while still giving the
commission the flexibility for negotiating in private. I also agree with the wisdom of granting
legislative leaders the power to appoint commission members in return for
barring current legislators from serving on the commission.
However, I must object to the entire amendment because of the
language in paragraphs 2.c. and especially 2.d.
Let me start with the “fair representation” provision in
paragraph 2.c. According to the Judiciary
Committee statement, this provision utilizes the standards established by Dr.
Donald Stokes, who served as the commission’s public member in both 1981 and
1991.
On close examination, it does not.
Stokes’s fairness doctrine states that the number of seats a
party holds in the legislature after each election should correlate to its
share of the vote in that election. For
example, if the statewide vote splits 50-50 split between the Democratic and
Republican candidates for office, then the share of legislative seats should be
evenly divided. However, according to
projections Stokes included in his 1993 monograph, if a party wins 60 percent
of the vote, it would be reasonable to see that party take as many as 75
percent of the seats.
Fair enough, but Stokes’s fairness test must to be applied
to the map as a whole after the fact.
You cannot a priori set aside
30 evenly-divided safe districts and then work on 10 so-called competitive
districts and guarantee that you will come up with a fair correlation of seats
to the statewide vote share.
More importantly, though, the crucial metric used by Stokes
is whether seats in the legislature correlate to the total vote for the legislature. Not how those seats correlate to the vote for
a variety of unrelated offices such as President, Governor, or U.S. Senate as
set forth in that paragraph.
This linkage is truly bizarre. As we know, voters use a different set of
criteria when evaluating who to support in elections for federal offices versus
state offices as well as for executive positions versus legislative ones.
If gubernatorial elections
told us what type of representation New Jersey voters want in their
legislature, I would be directing my remarks today to the Republican Chairman
of this committee. By the same token, if
presidential elections told us what New Jersey voters want in a legislature,
there would be only one Republican sitting on this committee today.
However, even if Stokes’s fairness doctrine was applied correctly,
it would still be unfair in practice. In
determining the legislative vote share of the two parties, Stokes did not
employ a straight tally of the statewide vote, but used a district-based vote
share average. In other words, instead
of using millions of data points – i.e. individual votes – to determine the New
Jersey electorate’s intent, Stokes used only 40 data points – the two-party
percentage margin in each district.
Stokes claimed that, due to widely varying voter
registration and turnout rates in each district, this formula would be more
representative of the will of all constituents – assuming that non-voters have
the same preferences as those who actually showed up to vote.
This may be true in theory, but it is not supported by the
data. I examined election results from
the past five legislative cycles – which is exactly what Stokes would do. I found 19 instances where one party or the
other did not field a full slate of candidates for either the Senate or the
Assembly, which represents a not insignificant 6 percent of all races during
that period. Moreover, 14 of those 19
cases – or nearly three-quarters of these uncontested races – were instances
where the Republican Party did not field a full slate. That means that 14 of the data points used in
the Stokes fairness test would produce a result at or near a 100 percent vote
share for the Democrats compared to only 5 data points that would produce the
same result for Republicans.
This would falsely skew the overall vote share result toward
the Democrats, unless you actually believe that there were no minority party
voters living in any of those 19 uncontested districts.
On the one hand, using non-legislative elections to
determine the legislative maps fairness relies on a false metric. But using the legislative election results as
Stokes would have done would produce a skewed metric.
Even if the proposed formula did not face these problems,
trying to codify this fairness doctrine in Constitutional language is akin to
making the ghost of Donald Stokes the commission’s public member in perpetuity. This is simply not something that should be
written into the Constitution.
In
fact, recent changes to Ohio’s legislative redistricting process which were
approved by voters there last year, includes a fairness provision that provides
sufficient leeway for the members of their commission. It says simply that: “the statewide proportion of districts whose voters, based on
[…] election results during the last ten years, favor each political party
shall correspond closely to the statewide preferences of the voters.”
While, the full provision does
use what I believe to be a false metric by including non-legislative elections,
the language is broad enough that it allows for each decennial commission to
negotiate its meaning while incorporating emerging standards, such as the
principle of “communities of interest” which has been largely ignored in New
Jersey’s process.
More
importantly, the Ohio standard also states quite clearly, and I quote, “[n]o general assembly district plan
shall be drawn primarily to favor or disfavor a political party.”
And it is on this standard that
SCR 188 fails miserably.
Because this resolution was
introduced less than four weeks ago, I have not had the same opportunity to run
vote simulations on potential outcomes, as I am sure its supporters have been
doing for the past few years. However, I
have been crunching numbers in New Jersey for long enough to know when
something smells fishy.
The process in paragraph 2.d.
claims to create competitive districts, but actually entrenches a permanent
Democratic majority by using a tortured definition of the word “competitive.”
In reality, competitive
districts drawn using this provision in the 2021 process would almost certainly
range from a smaller but definite Democratic advantage to an absolutely solid
Democratic advantage.
While this outcome might be in
line with the fairness doctrine, it defies any common sense meaning of the word
“competitive.”
For most voters, the word
“competitive” means that either party has a decent shot of winning the
seat. It does not mean that one party
simply won’t lose as badly in a certain district as it will elsewhere in the
state.
Over the past two decades, I
have had the privilege of hearing the opinions of hundreds of thousands of New
Jerseyans. And I can say with certainty that
our state’s residents want a truly competitive legislative map. Indeed, you need to look no further than
election returns which consistently show that competitive elections produce
higher turnout.
So I am left to wonder why the
drafters of this resolution would use the word “competitive” to describe an
outcome that is not competitive according to voters’ vernacular?
I am left with only one
conclusion. This is a bald-faced attempt
to pull the wool over voters’ eyes; making them complicit in a process that
will only serve to increase their cynicism about politics.
Anyone
reading the ballot question and interpretive statement about creating
competitive districts would come away with a far different interpretation of
what that means than what the proposed Constitutional language will actually
produce.
I fully endorse revisiting how our Legislative Redistricting
Commission operates. But if a fuller
process for public input is a good idea for the commission, then it should also
be a good idea for the legislative process by which these constitutional
changes are proposed.
Therefore, I urge you to table this resolution.
Thank you.
