EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen to the complete story and learn a lot more about the US and China on my Politics and Prejudices podcast, available now on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, IHeartradio and Lessenberryink.com.
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Making Sure We, and Our Votes, Count
I think it is sort of amazing that the United States has been making an effort to count each and every one of its residents every ten years since 1790, when there was no transportation other than horses and carts, few decent roads, and absolutely no modern technology or record-keeping of any kind, apart from paper and ink.
That first census found that there were 3.9 million people in the nation, and both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were convinced that there was a significant undercount. I’m sure they were right. I don’t know how it would have been possible to find and enumerate every trapper in the backwoods.
Michigan, by the way, wasn’t even mentioned, in part because the British hadn’t bothered to leave yet, and there were probably no more than a few thousand white people scratching out a hardscrabble existence.
Well, it’s almost two and a half centuries later. We have satellites capable of spotting and tracking people from space, social media everywhere, and we are still under counting our population. That matters a whole lot more than it did in 1790.
For one thing, states and communities get money for a lot of programs based on how many people live there. For another, political representation is based on population. Every congressional district in each state has to have exactly the same number of people, give or take only one. Legislative districts have to be almost as equal. When people get missed, communities are underrepresented.
And the poor and homeless and those who live on the edges of society are most likely to be missed. My guess is that we don’t have much of an under count in Grosse Pointe or Beverly Hills. But they do in certain parts of Detroit.
We need a complete count – and we need to draw districts that not only are as equal as possible, we need to draw ones that keep communities of common interests together, and aren’t drawn to assure a particular political outcome.
Apart from partisan considerations, it makes no sense that Kalamazoo and Battle Creek aren’t in the same congressional district, and even less sense that Farmington and Farmington Hills are in different districts.
In the legislature, some districts are so partisan that one reelected a representative a few years ago who had been convicted of eight felonies and had been charged with sexually abusing a male aide. He later resigned when more felonies surfaced. This makes no sense.
The vast majority of voters agree with me. I know this, because they enacted the Voters not Politicians amendment last year by a landslide.
But Republicans are still doing everything they can to try and thwart fairness and the will of the people by doing everything from filing lawsuits to trying to cut the redistricting appropriation and take back control of the process.
This is no longer an issue of partisanship, but of trying to save our democracy. We must do everything we can to keep this from happening.
Thanks for listening – and I look forward to being with you again soon.
