“Designed To Fail” — NY’s Redistricting Mess Was A Decade In The Making

That’s exactly what ended up happening this year.

“I was hoping that I would be proven wrong,” said Susan Lerner, Common Cause’s executive director. “And instead, I was repeatedly proven right. There’s no satisfaction in that. The process was flawed from the start and indeed has played out as we thought it would.”

Lerner said she’s disappointed in the outcome, even if she saw it coming. She pointed to states like California and Michigan as the gold standard for independent, citizen-led redistricting, and even the city of Syracuse, where a 15-member citizen panel is drawing the city’s lines.

She said she’s even more disappointed that there was little opportunity for public input on the Democrats’ plan; the proposal for congressional lines was just released on Sunday ahead of the Wednesday vote, despite community groups pressing for a hearing.

“We are not surprised by what we are seeing,” Lerner said. “This is what a partisan gerrymander looks like.”

Gianaris has become the Democrats’ main redistricting spokesperson, and he defended the congressional plan during Wednesday’s debate on the Senate floor.

He takes issue with those who say his party is engaging in gerrymandering. New York is a heavily Democratic state, after all, with more than twice as many Democrats as Republicans. And with Republicans controlling the Senate for much of the previous century, Democrats were put in the position of correcting previous Republican gerrymandering, he argues.

In terms of public input, Gianaris pointed to numerous public hearings held by the Independent Redistricting Commission. And he pointed to the fact that the state is on the clock: Ballot petitioning for the June 28th primary is slated to begin March 1st and districts need to be in place well before then, to ensure candidates are collecting signatures in the right place.

GOP Helped Put Process In Place

As far as the process goes, Gianaris says he’s only playing the cards he was dealt.

The 2012 redistricting deal was struck by Cuomo, then-Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, and then-Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, a Republican. Senate Democrats didn’t even vote on it back then; they walked out of the chamber in protest.

“People are right when they say this process was designed to fail, but it was designed by the Senate Republicans with Governor Cuomo 10 years ago,” Gianaris said in an interview with WNYC/Gothamist. “So we were dealing with what we had in front of us.”

Republicans say that’s nonsense. They point to the 2014 referendum in which the redistricting system was approved as proof that New York voters wanted lawmakers out of redistricting, and they’ve accused Democrats of tanking the “independent” process in order to draw the lines themselves.

“To say that is absurd,” said Nick Langworthy, chairman of the state Republican Party. “There was balance in our government 10 years ago. Nothing got done without Silver and the Senate Republicans and the governor.”

The congressional lines will now go to Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul to approve or veto, as will the state legislative lines after they’re passed Thursday. She’s widely expected…