New elections? Democrats want special elections held next year

Lawyers for voters who successfully sued to strike down state legislative district maps said last week they want new maps drawn by January and another round of legislative elections next year.

Here we go again.

The aggrieved party in this matter are Democrats who say the Republican-led Legislature drew maps that were racially gerrymandered to give Republican candidates an edge. The courts ruled they were right.

But the Democrats are hypocrites. As we have pointed out before, they pulled out the gerrymandering trick back in the 1980s when the NAACP threatened to sue the state unless districts were drawn to give black candidates more advantage in certain districts. Now that the trick has backfired on them, they want the system changed.

We agree that partisan map-drawing is not the fair way to go. A group of non-partisan retired judges showed recently that non-partisan congressional maps can be drawn that give neither party an unfair advantage. But getting either side to agree to that method is unlikely.

And so the back-and-forth legal battle continues, with the taxpayers paying for it all.

As for the special mid-term elections, we hope the courts say no. We've had just about enough politics in 2016 and would hope we could go one year without a bad rash of campaigning again so soon.

Published in Editorials on September 12, 2016 10:14 AM