FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

Contact:            Ted Costa
                        Office: (916) 482-6175
                        Cell: (916) 599-2986
                        Email: tedcosta@sbcglobal.net

 

PRESS RELEASE

SACRAMENTO, CA – December 4, 2007 – Ted Costa announced his opposition to Governor Schwarzenegger’s redistricting initiative, calling it a sham and a shame.  Costa said, “It must be opposed strongly by all reformers who are sincere at all about fair and impartial redistricting that serves the people not the politicians and special interests.”

Costa finds three main corruptions in the initiative Arnold endorsed yesterday…

  1. It does not include Congress, meaning the Congressional districts would still be gerrymandered by the legislature and in 2011 most likely by a democrat-dominated legislature and democrat governor.  Congress was left out of this initiative because Nancy Pelosi said she wanted to be able to continue to gerrymander (i.e. “cheat”) and Common Cause and the Governor said “OK, if she wants to keep cheating then let’s let her do that.”
  2. It has a process to pick a commission that creates a pool of ‘ringers’, political partisans who would be recruited and packed into the pool of applicants from which the commissioners would be chosen by a government agency hired by the governor and the legislature. If you want to retain control of districts by partisan hacks controlled by the legislature, this is a good way to structure it. If you care about true reform and fair elections, then this plan is totally unacceptable.
  3. It does away with reasonable criteria – i.e. respect for county and city boundaries, compactness, etc. – by making “communities of interest” the top priority.  It gives gerrymanderers complete freedom to express their “contribution to modern art”.  These interesting entities would be created ‘on the fly’ observing any rules that may be desired at the time and would trump all other criteria.

Costa said, "This initiative needs to be opposed strongly and loudly until it is dead”.

 

For more information contact Ted Costa at People's Advocate, Inc., (916) 482-6175 or at tedcosta@sbcglobal.net.

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