Map Submission
Retrieved May 21, 2024 at 7 p.m.
Dear City of Hayward staff and consultants:
I am submitting a set of proposed districts for the city council using the Excel spreadsheet method. My spreadsheet is attached. Most notably, it has 7 districts, despite the instructions to create 6 districts. The instructions imply that the city intends to retain a mayor elected at large. I see several problems with this.
First, from the two options described in Government Code 34886, the city council’s resolution 24-011 chose “a district-based election system” and not elections “by district with an elective mayor”.
Second, the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) defines only the pure district system as a “safe harbor” remedy that limits legal fees and shields a city from future lawsuits. Elections Code 14026 categorizes an electoral method as “at large” and within the crosshairs of the CVRA if any member of a governing body is elected at large. Is the mayor part of the governing body? Yes, Hayward city charter V.500 and Government Code 34903 define the mayor as a city council member. The “safe harbor” procedures defined in Elections Code 10010 rely on the definition in 14026.
Third, having 7 districts instead of 6 can increase the likelihood that CVRA protected groups can elect a candidate of their choice. So a future CVRA lawsuit could be successful, causing the city to incur additional legal and consulting fees, and causing the current process to be a waste of time.
If you think any aspect of this argument is incorrect, please let me know. With a 7-district council, the mayor would be selected by the council from among its members, as many other California cities do.
To prepare this map, I followed all other instructions in Karin Mac Donald’s presentation from the May 14 public hearing. The proposed districts are about as equal in population as can be achieved using the 123 available segments while keeping them contiguous. I did not use the spreadsheet’s race/ethnicity data in forming the districts, which is apparently the correct approach under the Federal Voting Rights Act as described on slide 8 of the presentation. I did not give special consideration to the interests of the plaintiff, which we are not instructed to do by either the presentation or the CVRA. The districts are compact, being free of tentacles other than those already created by the city’s outer boundary.
Regarding the communities of interest criterion, I consider this a hopeless task. Overall, if electoral outcomes are highly sensitive to how lines are drawn, there is something wrong with our electoral method. Communities rarely arrange themselves into compact, contiguous, non-overlapping regions. The best way to accommodate all communities of interest is to adopt proportional ranked-choice voting (PRCV) as an alternative CVRA remedy. This method allows communities to group themselves, without the help or interference of drawers of district lines.
PRCV is much less complicated and subjective than district line drawing. Voters make a ranked list of candidates from anywhere in the city in order of preference. If a candidate wins more than a council seat’s worth of votes, an appropriate fraction of those votes goes to the next choices on voters’ lists. Last-place candidates are sequentially eliminated, with votes going to next choices.
If a community of interest is dispersed throughout the city, its voters can still elect the candidate of their choice. For a PRCV-elected council, nearly all voters win accountable and satisfactory representation. This is achievable because PRCV does not pit voters against each other within districts, unnecessarily creating winners and losers among voters. PRCV does not allow the same group of voters to elect all of the candidates, as in the usual at-large method.
In our county, Albany has begun using proportional ranked-choice voting as a court-recognized CVRA remedy, and 3 other cities used ranked-choice voting within single-seat districts. After all maps are drawn, I expect that no map will be entirely satisfying to all, and the benefits of PRCV will be clearer to everyone.
Until then, we must go through the exercise of drawing maps. I have some questions about next steps:
1. Is it easy for you or me to import the Excel-drawn districts into the online mapping tool? This would allow easier visualization of maps, and allow us to make further edits using the smaller segments in that tool to obtain more equal populations.
2. Could the demographer prepare a map showing an overlay of all other district lines that bisect Hayward, such as assembly, supervisor, BART board, and park districts? This would provide valuable context for comparison to proposed district maps, and help us avoid creating tiny slices along crisscrossing district lines requiring the Registrar of Voters to print many new permutations of ballot cards.
The spreadsheet file that I downloaded on May 19 had errors in the SUMIF formulas in row 15, columns E through O of tab 2. To reduce file size, I deleted the map tabs in my submitted file, but they correspond to those in the file I downloaded on May 19.
Thank you for providing the mapping tools to the public, and for consideration of my map.