CA Democrat Jeanne Raya Warns Against Map War
When Jeanne Raya, one of the rotating chairs of California’s first Citizens Redistricting Commission, testified before the state Assembly, her message was simple: California built a transparent, voter-first way to draw maps, and we shouldn’t trade it for revenge politics. She reminded lawmakers that voters themselves created an independent commission, selected to reflect the state’s diversity, bound by constitutional criteria, and barred from self-dealing. The point wasn’t partisan. It was practical: keep map-drawing in public and accountable to voters, not partisan insiders.
Independent redistricting opened the process to everyone. In the last cycle, the commission ran a year-long process with hundreds of hours of public comment and 35,250 public submissions through email, live testimony, and mapping tools, followed by public review windows on draft maps. The final congressional, Assembly, and Senate plans were adopted unanimously. The process helped produce measurable gains in descriptive representation: analyses tied to the citizen-drawn maps documented significant increases for women and communities of color in the 2022 cycle.
This summer, national “map wars” spilled into California. After Republicans in Texas moved toward a mid-decade redraw to lock in additional House seats, Governor Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders advanced a plan to suspend California’s commission-drawn congressional maps and send new, legislature-drawn lines to a statewide special election framed as a one-time response to Texas. Jeanne Raya flagged the danger of revenge politics, urging California to keep its process independent rather than escalate the arms race.
Raya’s core warning matches what we’ve seen across states: when politicians control the pen, safe seats multiply, the decisive contest moves to narrow primaries, and general elections become formalities. Communities, especially communities of color, are more easily cracked or packed, diluting their voice, representation and power, and weakening their ability to hold officials accountable. California’s citizen-led model, by contrast, is built around criteria the public can see (equal population, Voting Rights Act compliance, respecting cities/counties/communities of interest, compactness, and a ban on favoring parties or incumbents). Those guardrails are why the process earned legitimacy and why sidelining it now would erode it.
Jeanne Raya noted that California already has a gold-standard process. If other states slide into partisan redraws, the remedy isn’t to copy them; it’s to defend and strengthen independent, public-facing map-drawing in California and to continue to make it easier for people to participate. Independent redistricting is necessary for competition, choice, accountability, and representation that reflects the communities who live with the results.
California should not trade a voter-designed, transparent process for a mid-cycle power play. Keep maps independent, public, and accountable to the people. If California lawmakers want to lead the nation, they should strengthen the citizens’ commission voters chose over and over again, and modernize elections with Consensus Choice Voting.
