Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Sun Editorial:

Leadership failure

Governor shouldn’t abdicate responsibility of redistricting to the courts

Every decade, the Legislature is required by law to redraw the boundaries of congressional and legislative districts, and that’s never an easy task. Both parties jostle to create maps favorable for their candidates.

Typically, the Legislature and the governor negotiate and hammer out a compromise, and sometimes that takes a special session. But this year, there hasn’t been a compromise and apparently won’t be.

Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval vetoed two redistricting plans passed by the Legislature and has said he has no intention to call a special session. He has instead left the matter up to the courts. Both Republicans and Democrats filed suit earlier this year, asking a judge to draw new maps should the plans in the Legislature fail.

Sandoval, who is Hispanic, was critical of the plans passed by the Democratic majorities in the Assembly and Senate, accusing them of violating federal election law that says there can be “no fracturing and no packing” of minority groups in redistricting efforts. He said the Democratic plans were “unfair” because they didn’t create exclusive Hispanic districts. And in one of his veto messages, he took a high-minded tone, complaining that the districts “were drawn exclusively for political gain.”

Not that he and his party know anything about that. Sandoval might remember that the last redistricting was finished in a special session in 2001 — because of a Republican effort to draw favorable congressional districts.

And if Sandoval really wants to talk about fairness, perhaps he should take a close look at redistricting plans his party submitted this time around. Republicans proposed packing a few districts with heavy Hispanic populations.

How is that supposed to be fair? Sandoval argues that the law requires such a plan because it would “afford Hispanics an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choosing.”

But that’s disingenuous. What the Republican plan would do is dilute the overall Hispanic vote by limiting it to a few districts. That wouldn’t serve Hispanics well, but it would do quite well for Republicans, who have had a real problem trying to court the Hispanic vote with their harsh rhetoric on immigration. Republican complaints about fairness ring hollow when they are merely jockeying for political position.

“Our community will not be used by the Republican Party in a transparent attempt to pack Hispanic voters into as few districts as possible in hope of winning more Republican seats,” Democratic Sen. Moises Denis, chairman of the Legislature’s Hispanic Caucus, said last month.

The fact of the matter is that redistricting is difficult. Parties will certainly try to create favorable maps, but that has to be balanced by making sure that voters aren’t disenfranchised by a gerrymandered map.

But this certainly isn’t impossible, as previous legislatures and governors have demonstrated. Sandoval can do better than this. In a statement issued Thursday, announcing he would not seek a special session on redistricting, Sandoval said, “I remain resolute in my determination to see that the new districts are fair and lawful.”

If he really is resolute, he won’t abdicate the responsibility of redistricting to the court system. In Nevada, redistricting is not a job for judges — it’s that of the Legislature and the governor.

Sandoval is acting as if there’s nothing he can do, but that’s nonsense. He’s the governor, and he should show some leadership and get engaged on the issue. If Sandoval doesn’t like what the Democrats have proposed and passed, he should offer up a viable plan of his own and start working with Democrats to reach common ground. And he should call a special session because there’s still work to be done.

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