Even Districts Are Elected in Gubernatorial Elections, Odd Districts in Presidential Elections
by Brian Leubitz
From a tweet from the Press-Enterprise’s Jim Miller:
The #CAredistricting commission is scheduled to act on numbering SD’s Thursday. Odds vs. evens have big implications. (Twitter)
Here in San Francisco, this has been the talk of much of the City. As San Francisco has been consolidated into one Senate District, if the number assigned was even, the eastern half of the City would be represented by nobody that it had elected. Mark Leno’s (SD-3) term expires in 2012. Leland Yee (SD-8) is termed out in 2014, but is running for Mayor. If he wins, there will be a special election in early 2012 to replace him. The replacement could either last a few months or for a couple of years.
In other parts of the state where senate districts are set to be dramatically changed, such as the North Coast and several areas in LA, they will represented by temporary assignments to Senators that they did not elect. This process is rather bizarre, but that’s what you get when you elect legislators for districts longer than 2 years, there really is no other way around it.
Keep an eye out for those numbers this week, it could raise a whole other raft of questions.
This is a part of the story I’ve been afraid to learn about because of the likelihood that it will lead to my banging my head through a door.
I don’t see how this can be remotely constitutional. The drafters of Prop 11 really screwed up here. They should have had all Senate seats go up for a vote in 2012.