A Major League Baseball sign-stealing scandal has been in the news recently. Several players and managers were caught up in it, and it cost Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora his job. A plan was devised to decode pitch signs by reviewing video, the signs were relayed to the dugout by text message, then the dugout communicated it to batters by banging a trash can lid, so the batter knew what pitch was coming.
Understandably, the teams that lost in the World Series were upset. One team got an advantage over the other, and the game was no longer fair. And whether your team was the victim of cheating or not, players and baseball fans of all teams are really angry about how the game got corrupted.
While you might be upset about baseball’s scandal, there’s another scandal that has been around for years here in New Hampshire: gerrymandering. We should be more upset about this type of cheating, because it attacks voting fairness, something we all hold dear. Both parties have done it, and it needs to stop.
New Hampshire’s constitution charges the Legislature with creating voting district maps, but under our current system, the party in charge gets to make the maps. Add in a little partisan “win at all cost” and “keep the incumbents in office,” and you have a motive and opportunity for gerrymandering, a nefarious practice that manipulates voting districts, giving the party drawing the maps an advantage.
In 2010, the party leaders in charge went into a back room out of the view of the minority party and the public, and applied sophisticated software to historical voting patterns and produced maps. When you did the statewide math, the maps did what was intended. A 2017 analysis by the Associated Press showed that in the 2016 election, the party doing the mapping gained 22 New Hampshire House seats. Gerrymandering kept incumbents in place in “safe” districts, but also created crazy districts like the Executive Council’s District 2, a ribbon that stretches from Hinsdale near Vermont, to Rochester near Maine. Worse, in both the 2002 and 2012 redistricting cycles, protracted cases reached the N.H. Supreme Court, causing months of delay and significant taxpayer expense.
In 2019 a bipartisan proposal for an independent redistricting commission, House Bill 706, passed the N.H. House and Senate with wide bipartisan support. This commission would have 15 members, five Democrats and five Republicans who would be empaneled like a jury, with each side given the opportunity to object to the other’s nominees. The chosen 10 would then pick the remaining five unaffiliated voters and third-party members. Meetings are required to be in public, and hearings were required around the state so the public might have input. Sounds fair, right? Unfortunately, the bill was vetoed.
The newest independent redistricting bill, HB 1665, is similar to HB 706, but recent amendments underscore the Legislature’s role in the constitutionally mandated process and should satisfy the governor’s concerns. The Legislature empowers the commission, the commission creates fair maps, the Legislature tweaks it and the Legislature approves it or amends it. All in public, all with the best interests of the voters in mind. The rules seem sensible and fair for both sides, leveling the playing field. That’s the way voters in New Hampshire want to play the game.
New Hampshire legislators and Gov. Chris Sununu, enough with the cheating. Voters, no matter what their party, want fairness in their voting process. They want confidence that their votes count. They want the best candidate to win fair and square. Let’s pass HB 1665 and draw fair voting districts in New Hampshire. Bang twice on a trash can lid if you agree.
(Brian Beihl is a resident of Northwood and is deputy director of Open Democracy Action, a Concord nonprofit that advocates for honest elections in New Hampshire.)