The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer.
By now most Americans know that Joe Biden will be our new president. Those who are still in denial should consider the fact that Republicans still won or retained seats in Congress. This might mean that even though Republican voters have seen through the façade that is Donald Trump, they remain loyal to their party for local representation. Or it might have something to do with gerrymandering.
For the past decade, Republican legislatures across the country have been using the drawing of voting maps to rewrite the American electorate. In Arizona, our map drawing is done by a committee of two Republicans, two Democrats, and one independent, but in other places it isn’t so potentially fair. In Wisconsin, for example, drawing the redistricting maps was done over four months by a Republican team in a motel room.
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No Democrat was allowed to see the map before it was produced. A Republican not on the team could only see the way “his” district was being drawn if he signed a non-disclosure document. The result?
An unnatural shift in the results of the subsequent elections toward the Republican seats, to paraphrase Carol Anderson and her book “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy.”
The effect of knowing that your vote counts for nothing is that you stop voting. But this year, people had a real stake in the outcome of the presidential election. Many who felt duped by voting for Trump the first time, or who had not voted at all, were determined to cast their ballot for Joe Biden or a third party candidate. The result?
The maps still worked, handing Republicans even more seats in the House of Representatives. But the maps had no effect in preventing the replacement of Trump as president.
Following the 2020 Census, redistricting will be happening again in 2021. Arizona once again has a chance to make voting here more even and fair. Where I live, in Cochise County, we see a consistent division of votes cast.
No matter how qualified a Democrat or independent candidate is, no matter how hard he or she campaigns and no matter how inadequate and corrupt our current representation in the Arizona Legislature, Republicans win by a ratio of two to one. In times past, our elections were more healthy, going red one year, blue the next. Not for the past 10 years has this been possible.
Our district, LD-14, was the last to be considered in the last redrawing of districts; hence, we got what was left over. If we had been grouped with Santa Cruz County instead of with Greenlee and Graham Counties, we might still have a balance.
The question is, do Americans still believe the mantra, “One person, one vote?” If we believe that mantra, then we all should be outraged at party policing of election boundaries, no matter what party is doing it. A healthy democracy is one in which people “agree to disagree.”
To provide a vehicle for any other arrangement is an invitation to despotism. Instead, we need an equal playing field, where voters have to listen to what the candidates say, not what the party says, when placing our most precious vote in their hands.
E. Kathy Suagee is a retired English teacher and bookstore manager and is the current president of the Northern Cochise County Democrats Club.
