Is Los Angeles the Future of Redistricting?

Do two wrongs make a right?

That’s the question California voters must answer following Governor Gavin Newsom’s announcement of the Election Rigging Response Act. If passed by voters in a special election this November, the Act would redraw the state congressional district map and add five Democratic congressional districts in California. The Act aims to nullify Texas’ new congressional map, which the Texas State Senate passed and Governor Greg Abbott signed into law in August. Texas’ blatant power grab shocked the nation, as it gerrymanders state districts with the aim of flipping five U.S. House of Representatives seats red. If the plan succeeds, those additional five seats would give Republicans a crucial advantage in the 2026 U.S. House of Representatives elections.

Gov. Newsom has framed the redistricting plan as his only option. “We can’t stand back and watch this democracy disappear district by district,” Newsom stated in his announcement of the Act. “We have got to meet fire with fire.”

However, Gov. Newsom’s move has sparked controversy regarding whether Democrats should adopt the Republican playbook. As both sides play a game of tug-of-war, the American people are left in the middle, wondering: where will it all end? Will back-and-forth partisan gerrymandering define the future of American politics?

Perhaps not; there’s still hope for another way forward, and it can be found in Los Angeles. There, a Charter Reform Commission is considering political reforms that could help the city lead by example by increasing the council’s accountability to the public, making democracy work at the local level.

The Commission is composed of 13 volunteers chosen by Mayor Karen Bass, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, and former city council president Paul Krekorian. The Commission’s job is to propose improvements to the Los Angeles City Charter, the city’s governing document.

The creation of the Charter Reform Commission is part of a push for governmental reform in response to a string of City Council scandals, ranging from three council members being found guilty of corruption (with a fourth one charged in August 2025) to a hot mic recording of three other council members making racist comments.

In a city defined by multiculturalism and continuous urbanization, district elections exacerbate struggles for representation and land-use issues. Members of the Los Angeles City Council hold immense power over land-use issues in their respective districts. In a city of four million residents and a multitude of identity-based coalitions competing for 15 City Council seats, underrepresented groups often end up dissatisfied.

The full audio of the hot mic recording reveals that the three implicated council members, who were all Latino, were meeting to discuss increasing Latino representation on the council. Making racist remarks while working toward representation seems ironic, yet it reveals the underlying issue: Los Angeles City Council elections are a zero-sum game. Identity-based coalitions know they must contend against one another to gain more representation, even if that means resorting to underhanded tactics such as gerrymandering.

In October 2022, at the time of the meeting, the 15-member City Council was composed of six white council members (40%), four Latino council members (27%), three Black council members (20%), and two Asian council members (13%). In comparison, the 2020 U.S. Census reported Los Angeles to be 28.9% white, 46.9% Latino, 8.3% Black, and 11.7% Asian, demonstrating the underrepresentation of Latinos on the Los Angeles City Council.

As a result of redistricting from 2021-2022, as well as resignations, the City Council is now composed of five white council members (33%), five Latino council members (33%), three Black council members (20%), and two Asian council members (13%). While Latino representation has improved marginally, the group remains underrepresented.

In the aftermath of the hot mic scandal, California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an investigation into the City Council’s redistricting process. In October 2024, Bonta urged council members to redraw districts to ensure sufficient Latino representation. He called for the redistricting process to comply with the Voting Rights Act and California’s Fair Maps Act, which require districts to ensure underrepresented groups have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.

Another response to the hot mic scandal came from the California chapter of the prominent national redistricting reform organization Common Cause, which called for the establishment of an Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC) in Los Angeles.

Until now, Los Angeles City Council members have held the power to appoint members of the redistricting commission. As a result, appointees have regularly had connections to City Council members and gerrymandered districts in favor of their appointers.

In November 2024, voters passed Amendment DD, a ballot measure to establish an IRC to draw council lines after the 2030 Census. An IRC in Los Angeles will strip City Council members of their power to manipulate redistricting lines in favor of themselves and their identity-based coalitions.

Yet, while the IRC will prevent gerrymandering stemming from council members drawing their own district lines, proponents of ranked-choice voting contend that it fails to address the underlying cause of this corruption: winner-takes-all single-seat districts.

Currently, Los Angeles has the largest City Council districts of any major city in the United States, with each of the 15 districts containing about 260,000 residents. For comparison, Chicago’s 50 districts represent about 53,900 residents each, and New York’s 51 districts represent about 166,000 residents each.

The Charter Reform Commission is considering a proposal to increase the number of City Council districts. By doing so, the Commission would decrease the number of constituents that each City Council member represents, enabling them to represent the interests of their constituents more effectively.

Beyond increasing the number of seats on the City Council, redistricting reform organizations such as Cal RCV and FairVote, as well as the Green Party, are advocating for California cities such as Los Angeles to adopt ranked-choice voting.

The Los Angeles City Council’s current election system begins with a Primary Nominating Election, in which any candidate who receives more than 50% of a district’s vote is declared the winner. In races where no candidate receives a majority of the vote, the top two candidates advance to the General Municipal Election for a runoff. In contrast, under the framework of ranked-choice voting, voters rank all candidates in order of preference, and the candidate with the majority of the votes is the winner.

Redondo Beach became the first city in Los Angeles County to hold a ranked-choice voting election in March 2025. The election was a success, with voters reporting that they favor the new voting system and found it easy to use.

Proportional ranked choice voting goes another step further. In this voting system, several candidates with smaller shares of the vote are selected as winners of multiple open seats. Just as a candidate running for one open seat needs more than 50% of the vote to win, a candidate running for one of two open seats needs more than 33.3% of the vote to win, and so on.

One potential model for Los Angeles that would both triple the number of representatives and enact ranked choice voting is restructuring the City Council from one seat per district to three-seat districts. In each district, council members would be elected by proportional ranked choice voting: a candidate would need more than 25% of the vote to win one of a district’s three seats.

The election results produced by these reforms would more accurately represent the size of Los Angeles’ Latino community, which is largely dispersed throughout the city rather than concentrated in select areas. In 10 out of 15 districts, Latino people constitute at least one-third of the population. Therefore, based on the demographics of the current City Council map, Latino candidates would likely win one or two seats in most districts, potentially enabling them to win a near-majority of seats and gain more commensurate representation.

More broadly, proportional ranked choice voting would enable any constituency group that represents a quarter of the vote to gain representation, as opposed to the status quo, in which candidates need a majority of votes to win, and thereby up to 50% of voters may be unrepresented in their district. Thus, under these reforms, more Angelenos would vote for candidates who actually win, and more voters would gain representation.

By reforming the City Council to prevent corruption and increase representation, Los Angeles’ Charter Reform Commission has an opportunity to break the cycle of back-and-forth gerrymandering and create a blueprint for the rest of the country to follow.

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