The 19th State Senate District is a case study of why redistricting reform is needed.

No doubt it’s small comfort to Hannah-Beth Jackson, whose upset bid to win a State Senate seat eroded beneath daily drips of absentee vote counts, but the political chicanery that customized the district for a Republican candidate is also on its way down the drain.

At press time, the Democratic ex-assembly­member had fallen 2,456 votes behind Republican rival Tony Strickland in a fiercely battled race that Jackson led by 103 ballots on Election Day. For Jackson supporters, Strickland’s steady gains in ongoing tallies of tens of thousands of mail-in votes transformed a too-close-to-call contest into one that’s too-hard-to-watch.

At the same time, a similar dynamic unfolded in absentee vote counting over Proposition 11. The state initiative aims to replace the sleazy practice by which lawmakers draw the lines for their own districts with a more open process that hands the arcane job of political redistricting to an independent commission. As in the Jackson-Strickland contest, the Prop. 11 vote was very close at first, but its backers now enjoy a nearly 175,000 vote lead, and it seems the ayes have it.

If Prop. 11 had been in place when the 19th District map was drawn, Jackson might well be packing her bags for Sacramento. The lines were crafted in the 2001 reapportionment, the constitutionally mandated process of aligning legislative boundaries with the once-a-decade U.S. Census.

Prop. 11 was drafted to cure a problem that was especially acute in California in 2001: lawmakers using reapportionment legislation as a kind of Incumbents’ Relief Act. Historically, partisan leaders in Sacramento have made protecting the reelection prospects of sitting colleagues a top priority; this means that voter populations in most districts heavily favor either Democrats or Republicans. The result: General election contests become meaningless; the real battles come in the primaries, where smaller turnouts favor very conservative Republicans and very liberal Democrats, not moderate centrists. In Sacramento, this leaves little room for compromise, but oodles for political posturing (see: Budget, California, 2008).

In the 2001 reapportionment, a last-minute partisan maneuver added a thick dollop of Republicans to the district for GOP incumbent Tom McClintock, a hard-core conservative and Strickland’s political mentor. Seven years later, that little-noticed move is a crucial factor in Strickland’s likely win over Jackson.

Tony Quinn, a veteran of 30 years of Sacramento reapportionment wars, is now an editor of the California Target Book, the state’s bible of political demographics. He told me that when capitol leaders unveiled new maps in 2001, he and his colleagues reported that McClintock’s proposed new district looked far more competitive than his old seat, because the Thousand Oaks Republican had “had to come north and absorb all the Democratic part of Santa Barbara.”

McClintock squawked to party leaders that his new district had not enough Republican voters and too damn many Democrats, Quinn recalled. Within two weeks, the strongly Democratic towns of Santa Paula and Fillmore in Ventura County were removed from his district, and a very Republican area around Santa Clarita in Los Angeles County was added, according to a reconstruction of the incident by Timm Herdt, capitol reporter for the Ventura County Star.

(Background alert: In drawing new district lines, key criteria have emerged from a long history of legal actions over the subject of reapportionment. One of these is population equality — that is, all State Senate and all Assembly districts should be the same size. Districts also are supposed to be compact, contiguous, and respect electoral boundaries, concepts more open to interpretation. Applying the “reasonable man” standard, the McClintock switch met the population equality test; the others, not so much).

Any doubt that the 2001 gerrymander of the 19th District was decisive may be eased by checking county-by-county results for the Jackson-Strickland race. This calculus is based upon the most recent counts available at press time:

a) Jackson leads Strickland in the Santa Barbara part of the district, 70,098 votes to 56,744 (55-45 percent): Net: Jackson +13,354.

b) Strickland leads Jackson in the larger, Ventura County area, 126,922 votes to 115,477 (52-48 percent) Net: Strickland +11,445.

c) Bottom line in these two “compact” and “contiguous” parts of the district that observe local boundaries: Jackson + 1,909 votes.

d) Then add in the piece of L.A. County, shirt-tailed on for a GOP incumbent: Strickland absolutely smashes Jackson 16,294 to 11,929 (58-42 percent), for a net of 4,365 votes.

e) Do the math: Strickland’s 15 percent edge in L.A. County, where partisan balance is not competitive, puts him 2,456 votes ahead of Jackson overall.

That’s how gerrymandering works. All hail Proposition 11.

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