LUCERNE — One person, one vote.
That was the principle guiding the Lake County Supervisorial Redistricting Committee Thursday night during their public meeting at the Lucerne Senior Center.
The whitewashed west wall of the meeting room was covered with five different multicolored charts of Lake County, each with a bold orange line dividing the five supervisorial districts into new shapes.
The district boundaries are being redrawn to reflect population estimates from new census data, as mandated by the 14th amendment. Passed in 1869 to grant citizenship to newly-freed slaves in the United States, the amendment has since been interpreted to require every voting district to have an equal population, ensuring no citizen has more voting power than their peers. For example, a citizen voting in a district with 10 people would have 100 times as much voting power than a citizen in a district with 1000 people.
The new boundaries probably won”t effect elections much, said district three Supervisor Denise Rushing, one of 10 people present at the meeting. However, there was an election in recent years that was decided by less than 20 votes, she said.
“You can have close elections in these small communities,” she said.
The century-old practice of redrawing districts using a population table and tedious math has been revolutionized by a computer program called Geographic Information Systems, said Alan Flora, administrative analyst to the redistricting committee.
“Before GIS, they would send you a bunch of paper maps and you”d have to draw the boundaries with a pencil,” Flora said, highlighting a voting block on his black laptop. “This way you can do it in a matter of two seconds.”
When the planners draw a proposed boundary on the map, GIS can tell them exactly how many people live in the new district, because it”s is programmed with the newest census data, Flora said.
Of the five proposed districts, two divide the population of Clearlake differently, and the other three are clockwise and counterclockwise rotations of the existing supervisorial district boundaries.
The Lake County Supervisors has authority to draw their own electoral districts, but make their decisions based on the public comments recommendations from the Redistricting Advisory Committee, said Diane Fridley, Lake County”s Registrar of Voters.
The new boundaries will be finalized at a public Board of Supervisors meeting on July 26 at 9:15 a.m. at the Lake County Courthouse.
Ben Mullin can be reached at BenjaminMullin14@hotmail.com or 530-519-0138.
