We dare you, GOP: Redistrict Florida in the sunlight

In 1812, Massachusetts Gov. and American Founding Father Elbridge Gerry signed a bill that created a Boston legislative district in the shape of a salamander, to benefit his partisans. Gerry (a year later, James Madison's vice president) thus founded the pernicious legacy of gerrymandering that contaminates our bodies politic to this day.

Two-hundred-nine years later and 1,313 miles away, political leaders in Tallahassee this fall are convening to redraw Florida state and congressional district maps. The political boundary adjustments are required by law every 10 years, to accommodate changes in the U.S. population.

It's a perfectly appropriate process, particularly in Florida, where the population grows steadily and the size of many demographic groups rises and ebbs like the tides. Political and financial travails send us new citizens from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Central and South America. High income taxes in the Northeast and a love of Florida shores and sunshine send us New Yorkers and Canadian converts.

So adjustments are needed, to craft districts roughly equal in population, while ensuring every citizen equal representation to the extent possible, and presumably without tilting the tables to favor one party or another.

Sadly, Gerry's legacy lives on in Florida.

As leaders of the dominant GOP begin this year's process in Tallahassee, guardians of electoral fairness and decency — the League of Women Voters and FairDistricts Now, among them — report that those running the show give every indication of returning to the backroom tactics that got them in trouble the last time around.

Few if any hearings have been scheduled around the state to gather public input into redistricting, whether in-person or virtual. Requests to have the actual map-drawing broadcast or streamed for public viewing also have been ignored, according to Ellen Freidin, CEO and General Counsel of FairDistricts Now.

Freidin spoke Thursday at a Zoom session on redistricting that was sponsored by the League of Women Voters and moderated by The Palm Beach Post's editorial page editor, Tony Doris.

A decade ago, GOP pols promised the most transparent redistricting process ever and held more than 25 public hearings to prove it. But in the end, they conspired with partisan operatives to draw maps that the Florida Supreme Court found — and the GOP admitted — were unconstitutionally skewed to help Republican candidates. In that 2014 case, League of Women Voters of Florida v. Detzner, Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis said state lawmakers made a "mockery" of redistricting.

It took three-and-a-half years to clean up that mess and create new maps that met legal and ethical muster. The result, Freidin notes: a lot more races where locked-in incumbents faced strong challenges, and some cases in which incumbents changed positions on issues in response to the unskewing of their district lines, knowing that the political balance of their constituencies shifted. In short, we got fair districts.

But once again the party that controls the process shows little interest in the cleansing power of sunshine. Worse, this now is a state majority under the sway of a national party set on suppressing the rights of those it fears might vote against it, namely Democrats as a whole and Blacks in particular.

It's a party enacting laws pretending to fix imagined electoral flaws, and whose leaders denigrate even-handed supervisors of elections and party colleagues who won't walk in lockstep, leaders who can't own up to a presidential election result that more than 60 courts across the nation validated. And here came Gov. Ron DeSantis to Palm Beach County last week, to announce with faux-Trumpist bravado that he's establishing a state enforcement team, to fight election fraud that doesn't exist, to rally his base and suppress our vote.

Late-night television host Stephen Colbert's mocking term "truthiness" of 2005 is no longer adequate to describe today's far more insidious mendacity, when democracy itself hangs in the balance. There's a bright line from rationalizing real electoral cheating, especially in a state as critical as Florida, to the end of the world as we know it. And they know it. And that's why they're doing it.

This year's map-making controls our state's political landscape for the next 10 years. But 209 years after the term gerrymandering was coined, it's clear its potential impact could stretch far beyond this decade. We need to establish a legacy of honesty and openness, and to leave Elbridge Gerry in the dust, where he belongs.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Editorial: Public must have a say in redrawing political districts.