What goes into drawing a California congressional district map? Or a state senate district map? Does it just involve taking a pencil and dividing the state’s land in equal population proportions?

Oakland Local recently talked with the California Citizens Redistricting Commission chairwoman, Connie Galambos Malloy, about her recent experiences creating California’s next congressional, senate, assembly and board of equalization districts.

To fully understand the process in which Malloy has engaged in, readers must understand the rules that the Citizens Redistricting Commission – or CRC – has to follow when creating districts. Though the commission must create districts with roughly the same populations, it also must strive not to break up individual cities, neighborhoods and counties into separate districts. All the while, it must make district boundaries as compact as possible and under the rules of the Voters’ Rights Act, try to keep minority groups together whenever possible. It also has to keep districts contiguous, and it cannot take into account where politicians live when creating districts. Finally, whenever the CRC votes to approve a map, three of its five Democratic members, three of its five Republican members and three of its four non-partisan members must agree on the map.

To assist the CRC with its large mission, Malloy said it hired a “legal firm, a bipartisan legal firm specializing in the voting rights act,” and a, “technical team that is a mapping team, a GIS team … called Q2. They are the ones … who are actually putting our directions into computerized mapping software.”

If the CRC gave Q2 a direction to keep Oakland and Richmond together, Q2 might respond by saying “’Well, here we ran the map, here is what it looks like, and here is the population. Here is the deviation from the ideal population size, so you might need to think about where you will want to add population around the edges.” The CRC would then have to go back and change the Oakland/Richmond district so that it could comply with population standards, as well as every other rule the CRC must follow.

Even with the outside mapping help however, Malloy said that before the commission even released its public rough drafts of its district maps, it still saw “many, many sets of visualizations prior to that.

“So every time we would start a line drawing session, we would start with a visualization of where we had left off, and we would constantly be making adjustments, adjustments, adjustments,” she said.

The CRC has had a particularly difficult time getting Southern California districts right.

“ … Southern California is much more densely populated,” Malloy said. “So, the Los Angeles region and the Orange County region, those are areas where we have a significant amount of fine-tuning to do, particularly in relation to the application of the Voters Rights Act.”    

Southern California has many different neighborhoods with similar interests, many different minority groups and many heavily populated cities. The CRC has had to be careful to keep similar peoples and areas together so as to not disenfranchise any particular group.

As for how the CRC has divvied up the rest of the state, Malloy said that, “the benefit of having a commission as diverse as it is, from so many different parts of the state, is that there is not really any part of the state that somebody on the commission doesn’t have a really familiar knowledge of.

“So, there are many times where a commissioner will play a lead role in helping us understand the on the ground nuances of some of the options that were considered.”

In fact, Malloy, an Oakland resident, has helped her commissioners understand her hometown and its surrounding areas. She even convinced her fellow CRC members to hold two meetings within city boundaries so they could get the right feel of Oakland. 

“I recommended that Oakland neighborhoods be grouped with similar communities of interest, and that we should not as a commission replicate within our proposed districts the historic splits that West Oakland has faced because of its freeway placements,” she said.

Malloy, who lives in West Oakland, says that the neighborhood has always struggled for political power because the freeways within its boundaries separate it from the rest of the city. She said she hoped that the CRC would consider such physical barriers when making decisions in regards to Oakland.

Even though CRC commissioners are highly knowledgeable about individual portions of the state, they still struggle to get map-making right. Oakland Local’s interview with Malloy took place shortly after the CRC first released its rough draft district maps. Though CRC members unanimously approved the rough drafts, Malloy said it would be “challenging, as we get closer to the final product, to have everyone on the same page.”

She said she believed the CRC largely approved the rough drafts because they were exactly that: rough. With the stakes higher, she thought it would be harder for all the commissioners to come to an agreement on all the maps.  

Malloy did say however that, “thus far we (the commissioners) have always been able to move ahead with what we’re working on, and we do have a process that if a number of commissioners have a concern about a district we have drawn, we can pull it up and look at it individually and give it a second pass at review.”

Malloy also stressed how important it would be for the commissioners to hear from the public about their rough drafts.

“So my advice would be, given how many folks in California voted saying this (the CRC) was a crucial piece of reform, please participate in the process,” she said. “Send us feedback to tell us what you think of the maps, because these maps are going to define who represents you for the next 10 years.”