No precinct is an island

LITTLE ROCK — “If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard, just keep putting off doing it.”

— Olin Miller

AN ELECTION commission in Jefferson County noticed a curious omission in the map of the state’s new congressional districts, and did what an election commission should do when it spots a problem: It reported it. As if the commissioners actually thought somebody in state government would do something about it. These people have faith.

By now the Case of the Missing Precincts has attracted the attention of the congressman from the First District, who wants to know if two precincts that should have been transferred from the Fourth District to his really were. Rick Crawford notes that Act 1242, the redistricting act, doesn’t specifically list these precincts as having been reassigned.

One of them is in little Wabbaseka, Ark., and the other lies along the border of three adjoining counties—Arkansas, Jefferson and Lonoke. Call them the lost islands of Arkansas’ new congressional map. Tiny precincts, but you can bet they’re important to the folks who live in them. Especially if they wind up in the wrong congressional district.

If these political isles have been assigned to the wrong district, it would raise a legal question about the constitutionality of the state’s new congressional districts, since the districts are supposed to be contiguous, not leave some precincts out.

This little misunderstanding needs to be ironed out before somebody makes a federal case out of it, literally. And embroils the state in another needless lawsuit that might have been avoided by a little research and a few clear answers now, not in court later.

Congressman Crawford sees a partisan conspiracy at work. Naturally. That’s the way politicians think. He’s a Republican, the Legislature that approved the new congressional districts is Democratic. And each party checks on the other. Or is supposed to.

But not every glitch has to be some kind of plot. This little foofaraw is enough to make an observer wonder: What ever happened to the simplest of explanations for political problems: not some nefarious scheme but honest, good old-fashioned incompetence? It tends to be everywhere in this Age of Obama, covering American life like a blanket of mediocrity. Could it explain this problem, too? Why go looking for some underhanded Democratic scheme when the explanation could be a lot simpler? Like sheer laziness. Or inability to admit a mistake. If indeed a mistake was made. There’s a lot to be cleared up here.

ASPOKESPERSON for the state’s House of Representatives, or at least for its speaker, says the precincts, though they’re called “voting districts” in the Census Bureau’s lexicon, are just where they ought to be—in the First District. When pressed to answer the congressman’s complaint, she just repeats that same robotic response: All is in order. So says the Legislative Research Bureau and therefore so it must be. To hear this message again, just punch 1 and repeat the question. Talk about a non-responsive response.

How explain these two different versions of the legislative map? This wouldn’t be the first time a battle was lost because somebody couldn’t read a map. Or is this a problem because somebody forgot to send something to some government agency (the Census Bureau) and a couple of precincts were lost?

The important thing at this juncture isn’t to decide who’s at fault, if anyone is, but to make sure these precincts/ voting districts are in the right congressional district. Instead, the squabble was still unresolved last time we dared look.

Government is supposed to solve problems, not create them. Isn’t it time for all concerned to sit down quietly in the same room, maybe with a map and a cup of coffee, or even better a soothing cup of tea, and straighten out their differences? And if there’s a problem here, fix it—not aggravate it. Or would that be unspeakably reasonable? It’s remarkable what can be accomplished when partisan politics is left out of the discussion and all just follow the law.

At last report, the speaker of the state’s House of Representatives didn’t see any problem. The whole issue, says his chief of staff, “has been resolved. The House’s opinion is that no one was left out of the legislation. . . .” The speaker is standing pat. See no evil and all that, and maybe the whole business will go away. Indeed, according to his chief of staff, it’s already been taken care of. Mainly by ignoring it, apparently.

But now Jefferson County’s election commission has appealed to Arkansas’ secretary of state to rule on the matter, or maybe the state’s attorney general. One is the state’s top election official, the other its top legal counsel. Why not consult them? That’s what they’re there for. Do we really want the Ledge’s establishment judging the legal merit of its own work? That’s scarcely an unbiased court.

The election commission’s request is reasonable enough. To quote its chairman, Trey Ashcraft, “I just want something really specific that covers us legally. I just don’t want to have an election here where we don’t have somebody in the right district.” His caution would seem just simple prudence. Why not anticipate any legal questions before they arise? It’s a lot cheaper that way.

CLARK HALL, a state rep from Marvell who’s already announced for Rick Crawford’s congressional seat, doesn’t see any problem here. What, him worry? “The map is legal, the map is fine, the map is what we’re going to go with. End of story.”

Really? And suppose some litigious type doesn’t see it that way, and gets a judge to agree with him? Or has Representative Hall decided he’s a court, too?

End of story? This one could be only beginning. So could the expense if the state’s taxpayers have to defend this legislative map in court.

It’s enough to make you wonder if this is the kind of representation Mr. Hall would provide the First Congressional District if he becomes its congressman—one who ignores loose ends in legislation because he doesn’t see any. Or if there is one, he doesn’t want to bother fixing it. (“Nobody wants to get into that mess again, including me.”) Unfortunately, no mess is really fixed till it’s fixed right. You have to wonder why somebody would run for the Legislature if he weren’t interested in solving the state’s problems or, as in this case, anticipating and preventing them.

You would think that by now Congress has passed quite enough fuzzy legislation (see all the questions that still linger about ObamaCare) without having somebody like Clark Hall up there to tell us there’s no problem here and to move on.

It’s up to the state and its counties to provide the Census Bureau with accurate boundaries for voting districts. And, to quote an official with the bureau’s office in charge of collecting data on congressional redistricting, “In the file that we received from the state, those two districts were not included.”

So what’s to be done about it? Stu Soffer of Jefferson County’s election commission has the right idea. “I have no doubt that somewhere down the line,” he says, “someone forgot to send something to the secretary of state,” and “if a mistake was made, fix it. What’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that even little fusses can get complicated once politics, congressional ambition, legislative defensiveness and the human tendency to neglect problems all get involved. Which they have in this little controversy that’s getting bigger every time we look. Pretending that it’s gone away doesn’t mean that it has.