By: Lori Bledsoe
The Alpine Sun
According to recent articles about GUHSD proposed redistricting, gerrymandering is the propelling need to make these changes.
According to Wikipedia, The primary goals of gerrymandering are to maximize the effect of supporters’ votes and to minimize the effect of opponents’ votes. These can be accomplished through a number of ways:
By: Lori Bledsoe
The Alpine Sun
According to recent articles about GUHSD proposed redistricting, gerrymandering is the propelling need to make these changes.
According to Wikipedia, The primary goals of gerrymandering are to maximize the effect of supporters’ votes and to minimize the effect of opponents’ votes. These can be accomplished through a number of ways:
•“Cracking” involves spreading voters of a particular type among many districts in order to deny them a sufficiently large voting bloc in any particular district. An example would be to split the voters in an urban area among several districts wherein the majority of voters are suburban, on the presumption that the two groups would vote differently, and the suburban voters would be far more likely to get their way in the elections.
•“Packing” is to concentrate as many voters of one type into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts. In some cases, this may be done to obtain representation for a community of common interest (such as to create a majority-minority district), rather than to dilute that interest over several districts to a point of ineffectiveness (and, when minority groups are involved, to avoid possible racial discrimination). When the party controlling the districting process has a statewide majority, packing is usually not necessary to attain partisan advantage; the minority party can generally be “cracked” everywhere. Packing is therefore more likely to be used for partisan advantage when the party controlling the districting process has a statewide minority, because by forfeiting a few districts packed with the opposition, cracking can be used in forming the remaining districts.
•“Hijacking” redraws two districts in such a way as to force two incumbents of the same political party to run against each other in one district, ensuring that one of them will be eliminated, while usually leaving the other district to be won by someone from a different political party.
•“Kidnapping” aims to move areas where a certain elected official has significant support to another district, making it more difficult to win future elections with a new electorate. This is often employed against politicians who represent multiple urban areas, in which larger cities will be removed from the district in order to make the district more rural.
These tactics are typically combined in some form, creating a few “forfeit” seats for packed voters of one type in order to secure more seats and greater representation for voters of another type. This results in candidates of one party (the one responsible for the gerrymandering) winning by small majorities in most of the districts, and another party winning by a large majority in only a few of the districts.
By the above definition, the Grossmont Union High School District board of trustees may very well be trying to use many of the gerrymandering practices to weaken their constituent’s voices, and to possible force out Alpine High School supporting board member Priscilla Schreiber.
Priscilla Schreiber has always been a strong supporter of Alpine’s educational needs, stepping up directly against Jim Kelly’s opposition to the new construction of a promised high school. With elections looming, the redistricting that GUHSD has proposed by their redrawn districting maps, have eliminated Schreiber as Alpine’s representative, and have put Kelly as trustee that would take over Alpine and it’s surrounding areas. Plus, it has grouped Schreiber’s area with Sheild’s area, thus eliminating Schreiber in the next election as she would no longer have a territory.
Also, East County’s large Chaldean community would be distributed into three new districts to weaken their united voice in high school issues.
The Board of Education is having several community hearings to collect community input. It is imperative that the Alpine Community show up in droves to let the BOE know their thoughts. At the last meeting, the BOE directed the feeder schools to take extraordinary measures to inform local parents of the meetings. We published meeting times in last week’s issue.
The meeting in Alpine will be on April 4th at JMMS at 6 p.m.
