Is it any surprise that San Francisco — The City that nurtured abstract expressionist legends such as Clyfford Still and Jay DeFeo — was at one time the epicenter of partisan gerrymandering?
One notorious U.S. House district, which one might call “the Pollock,” splashed from Vallejo through Marin, hopped the Golden Gate, hugged San Francisco’s industrial east side, then jackknifed into Daly City. The late, great Philip Burton, maestro of the map, designed it for his brother John; Barbara Boxer later won the seat after a bruising primary, and the rest is congressional history. The lines were shameless, the logic ruthless, the results brutally effective.
In the early 2000s, California produced even more avant-garde maps, punctuated by Congresswoman Lois Capps’ 23rd District. Commonly known as the “Ribbon of Shame,” the district stretched some 200 miles down the central coast from Cambria to Oxnard, narrowing to 2 miles wide at points. The infamous ribbon was a key contributor to then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reform agenda, which successfully wrestled the pen from politicians and put it in the hands of an independent commission. For a decade, we held ourselves out as the republic’s redistricting adults…