Ever since Joe Biden carried Pennsylvania in the 2020 presidential election, Republican leaders have attempted to discredit that fair and accurate vote. They are about to spend a minimum of $275,000 in public money on an “investigation” of that election because, they claim, people must have trust in the government.
If people don’t have trust in the government, of course, it’s because these very same politicians have told them not to trust it.
If state lawmakers truly wanted Pennsylvanians to trust their government, they would do away with practices that state residents repeatedly identify as leading to mistrust. At the top of that list is political gerrymandering, the practice of drawing congressional and state legislative districts for political advantage rather than fair representation.
In polling in Pennsylvania this fall by the bipartisan political advocacy group RepresentUS, 89% of respondents said they opposed a redistricting process that fashioned districts for the benefit of either political party or individual politicians.
Asked what would increase their confidence in elections, 57% of respondents cited the elimination of gerrymandering as their first response.
There is some hope this year that the process and the resulting districts will be cleaner than in the past. The state has divided government, with a Republican-majority Legislature and a Democratic governor. And the state Supreme Court, which eliminated heavily gerrymandered congressional districts in 2018 and commissioned a fair district map, already has demonstrated scant tolerance for gerrymandering.
Yet lawmakers have yet to reveal congressional or legislative maps, even though 19 other states already have completed their processes. The risk is a repeat of 2011, when the self-serving legislators sat on the maps until the last moment and rammed them through to passage with scant public review. Those maps were so rigged that the Supreme Court prevented their use for the 2012 elections.
If lawmakers want to increase trust in government, they will produce maps soon and conduct a highly transparent public vetting process.
— Scranton Times-Tribune (AP)
