Once in a Decade Redistricting Mini-Seminar with Manny Behar

hi i'm israel pesquitz i'm the community affairs director of kazakh and we are very proud to present manny bahar here to talk to you about the decennial redistricting thank you very much redistricting is the time when the politicians get to choose their voters rather than the voters choosing their politicians what is redistricting basically every 10 years the constitution requires a census to determine the population of each state and even of each small area and all of the the house of representatives the state legislatures everywhere they have districts and these districts have to be roughly equal in size now over the course of 10 years populations change people move in and people move out and districts that were roughly the same size 10 years ago may not be the same size today so the borders have to be adjusted to accommodate the current population and make districts that are equal in size now when this redistricting happens the lines can be drawn to favor certain people or to hurt certain people that let's say you have someone who in his last election he didn't do too well in a particular area in his district well he might want to get that area taken out of his district he might want to replace it with some place where he thinks he can or she thinks that she can run better so uh the way that it works the districts have to be contiguous and compact compact means that it's uh close together uh contiguous means that they're at uh that they're uh there is they're attached to each other so you could have a district that's uh contiguous running let's say from the northern part of queens all along the north shore of long island all the way out to montauk point that is continuous but it's not compact it's a long district the one is very far from the other and they would have very different uh interests that in suffolk county they may have farmland while queens is the heart of new york city uh the you could have a district that's compact but that's not contiguous you could have two areas that are close to each other that are similar and it's small but that there's a dividing line between them so the districts are supposed to be contiguous and compact now two other terms that uh you should uh know about are cracking and packing uh packing is when they try to put a lot of people who think the same way or of one ethnic group for one political party one religious background they tried to put them all in one area cracking is when you divide people up into several different districts now this can work in a number of ways and we'll get back to that in a little bit but very often the parties try to use the redistricting process to their advantage now for example you may have a three uh an area that would have three districts within it and overall that area may be evenly divided uh between the two parties but if you have one party in control of the redistricting processes is often the case so they could draw the lines they could do compacting that they would try to get all as many of the people in the other party as they can in uh into one district packing so they would create a district maybe 90 percent of the people in that district are from the other party and it's guaranteed that that the other party is going to win that district but what they've also done in the process is created two other districts that are about 65 percent for their party that they're pretty much assured of winning those two districts so even though the population is equal uh the party in control the redistricting process probably will win two out of those three uh seats just because of the way that they've drawn their district lines now uh to show how this could work uh in our neighborhoods let's say we have the uh davids of the large jewish population like you gardens hills or like forest hills well if you'd put all of kew gardens hills and all of forest hills and go up into fresh meadows and hillcrest jamaica state you would have a district with a very large jewish population and that would have significant uh influence if you would divide let's say a district you would make main street the border of a district you would divide up the kew gardens hills neighborhood you'd dilute the influence of the kew gardens hills neighborhood because they would be in two different districts similarly if you draw a district line along queens boulevard that you would divide up the forest hills community now sometimes it can be in our interest to be divided up that uh we would have we wouldn't have as much impact in any one district as we would have if we're all together but we'd have an impact in more districts uh so sometimes good to be all together sometimes it may actually be better if they uh divide our areas up and that's something that we have to uh keep an eye on uh now it also matters how they divide it up this is a map of the queen's community boards and basically the jewish population other than for rockaway is in port six eight and part of nine forest hills hugo and hills hill crest jamaica states and kew gardens well we're adjacent to western queens we're adjacent to south queens we're adjacent to north queens to flushing bayside uh so uh which district we would get attached to could make a huge difference as to who would represent us and how much impact that we can have the uh so it's redistricting can determine who represents us maybe even more than the election uh because uh the uh districting the redistricting can determine who gets elected or certainly which party or people from which neighborhood so whatever it is that you care about whether it's about israel whether it's the safety and security of our neighborhoods whether it's about infrastructure roads and bridges and highways and so on or it's about government benefits or taxes whatever it is that you care about though the those decisions are made by elected officials and the redistricting determine can help determine who your elected officials are so whatever it is you care about you need to care about redistricting and you need to keep an eye there will be public hearings uh there will be opportunities and new york has an independent commission that is supposed to take the process out of politics the reality is that the members of that independent commission most of them are appointed by the leaders of the state legislature and the people that they appointed appoint the other members and any uh any plan that the independent commission comes up with has to be approved by the state legislature so there is going to be uh politics in the uh process and we need to monitor it we need to keep an eye on these public hearings we need to let our elected officials know how we feel about it because the redistricting process could determine who represents us for the next 10 years