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Vote yes on 5 and 6

My fellow Floridians:

Most of the time, you don’t get to choose your representatives in the Florida Legislature and in Congress. Instead, they choose you.

Every ten years, state and congressional districts are redrawn to make sure they’re about equal in population. That’s all fine and good. Now here comes the fun part: the legislature—actually, the party that controls the legislature—gets to draw the lines!

When the Democrats are in power, they re-draw their own districts to include more Democratic areas, based on previous election results. And they’ll take a Republican area and split it among several heavily Democratic districts, effectively disenfranchising the people in that community. When the Republicans are in power, they do the same to the Democrats. This practice is known as “gerrymandering.”

The result: Districts are bizarrely-shaped (the original district to which the term applied looked like a salamander, hence the name) and sometimes barely contiguous, with neighborhoods connected only by highways or bodies of water. They often include communities that have little in common other than the fact that they happened to tend toward the same party in the past ten years.

And, more seriously, incumbents almost always win. Often, they aren’t even challenged at all. It’s not because there’s a lack of qualified candidates out there—it’s because politicians have rigged their own elections. They’ve chosen their voters instead of letting their voters choose them.

Amendment 5 will prevent gerrymandering for Legislative districts; Amendment 6 will prevent it for Congressional districts. The summaries you’ll see on your ballot state that

districts or districting plans may not be drawn to favor or disfavor an incumbent or political party. Districts shall not be drawn to deny racial or language minorities the equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice. Districts must be contiguous. Unless otherwise required, districts must be compact, as equal in population as feasible, and where feasible must make use of existing city, county and geographical boundaries.

Sounds like democracy to me. Vote yes on 5 and 6.

For more information, visit FairDistrictsFlorida.org and check out their 30-second TV spot.

For everyone who was bored by the above because it didn’t apply to them: Is this election cycle really the most negative ever? Hear what Founding Fathers and presidential rivals John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had to say about each other: Attack Ads, Circa 1800.