Keep Iowa’s proud tradition of nonpartisan redistricting

Forty years ago the Iowa Legislature rejected conventional politics and used a nonpartisan model to redistrict itself in a move that has become a national beacon for the one-person one-vote principle.

Now, armed with the new census data, Iowa lawmakers have a chance to do the same thing in the coming weeks. Leaders insist they’ll keep politics out of the process and follow the path laid down in August 1981.

Legislators would do well to keep that promise.

Lawmakers were anxious about the process when they gathered for the 1981 session. It would be the first opportunity for the Legislature to draft a new plan following parameters laid down by the Iowa Supreme Court.

Nine years earlier, on Jan. 14, 1972, the court sent a thunderbolt through state politics. The unanimous court threw out the Legislature’s 1971 remap plan, ruling that politics interfered with the goal of creating equal-population districts.

The court declared a new plan would be drafted by the court itself.

Legislative leaders were furious. No remap plan in Iowa history had a smaller disparity, they argued, with the disparity between the most and least populous districts being less than 4 percent.

But Justice Warren Rees, writing for the court, said legislators abandoned efforts to get even closer to parity. Instead they shaped districts to protect incumbents, preserve existing districts, and create districts that were safe for one party or the other.

Legislators conceded the point but said those changes were necessary to enable passage in the first place. Rees wrote that those considerations were not permitted in the world of one-person one-vote.

The court’s plan had a population disparity of less than 1 percent, the lowest in the country. Massive changes followed in the Statehouse. By the 1974 election, half of the lawmakers who had approved the 1971 remap plan either left politics or were voted out.

Eager to stay out of court the next time, legislators in 1981 came up with a new approach. Proposed maps would be drawn by the scrupulously non-partisan Legislative Service Bureau.

The goal, then and now, is to create districts as close to population parity as possible. The drafters cannot consider the home addresses of incumbents, nor any consideration of partisan strength in districts.

Further, districts must be as “compact” as possible, meaning they should be squarish, and should respect city and county borders whenever possible.

Legislators may either approve or reject the first plan, no amendments, and same for the second one. Should the first two be rejected, the third nonpartisan plan could be amended.

In 1981, the first and second LSB plans were rejected as lawmakers chaffed at the number of incumbents thrown together in common districts.

The third plan lumped 25 pairs of legislators together. One amendment redrew the lines so that only eight districts would be occupied by more than one incumbent. Mindful of the court’s warning about protecting incumbents, senators turned down the amendment 17-32.

Attention then centered on a House amendment introduced at the request of freshman Republican Congressman Cooper Evans, who was upset that the third LSB map gave him heavily Democratic Johnson County while taking away several traditional GOP counties. That amendment, too, was rejected.

By surprisingly large margins — 39-10 in the Senate and 92-5 in the House — and with little debate, the third non-partisan plan was approved and soon signed by Republican Gov. Robert Ray.

Minority Democrats were astonished.

“They (Republicans) played it square,” admitted House Democratic leader Don Avenson of Oelwein. He expected Republicans would try to isolate Democratic strengths and assure GOP control for the next decade, a mapmaking ploy known as gerrymandering.

“Our whole strategy was to end up in court,” he said.

Republican leaders said they simply kept their promise. GOP House Leader Larry Pope of Des Moines said, “I told them in floor speeches that we weren’t going to gerrymander and we didn’t gerrymander."

The result in 1982: All incumbent congressmen, including Evans, were re-elected, and the principles established by the Supreme Court 10 years earlier were honored by the process.

Iowa has gone on to conduct reapportionment that way in each of the succeeding three census years. Over those 40 years, both parties have captured legislative majorities but the boundaries of legislative districts have not been drawn to benefit the statewide strength of one party or the other.

Democracy works better when every vote has the same weight. Iowa’s method of getting there is the way to go.

Roger Munns of Des Moines is a former Gazette and Associated Press reporter who covered the first reapportionment under Iowa's current redistricting law in 1981.