Interesting, but the fire beneath the smoke isn't that clear.
The leading 'culprits' appear to be the very arbitrary nature of designing districts at all; the confusion from a new citizens' commission trying to do it; and the process that seemed pretty arbitrary in how it made decisions, in terms of public intput and how that input was used, how it was screened.
As far as the wrongs - let's see, the Democrats met to talk and strategize and kept their discussions quiet. Nothing shocking there.
They may have put people in public input meetings who represented their interests and did not disclose it. What were the rules, the expectations? Were they supposed to disclose it? Why was the committee relying on such unreliable information? I'm not sure how much wrong was done there - if they did wrong, I'm against that. And I don't like any misleading.
I'm just not sure what the 'meat' of wrongdoing is here. It seems more like trying to make basic politics sound icky. They wanted to keep more seats! They talked about it!
If anything, it sounds like the process went surprisingly well for what it was supposed to do as far as 'be decided by the commissioners'.
The issue here is unrelated to any other state, but it's worth noting, while it doesn't justify any issues with CA, that other states have issues - worse IMO - on this.
The scandal of Texas a decade ago, redrawing districits that were very partisan in the unprecedent between-censuses period, is more an actual scandal, for example.
Big business has the organization ALEC organizing to coordinate their interests through the Republican party nationally at the state level; they worked to take control of state governments, and as of 2010 did take control of a record number in I don't know how long, immediately followed by their agenda items fed to state legislatures including anti-union laws, voter supression laws, and de-regulation and pollution permitting laws.
That's an actual scandal. Worth nothing, but not the issue here, if there is one.
