From hidden tapes to ballot battles: The ugly side of redistricting

In Los Angeles, raw political power was laid bare in a leaked secret recording. In Sacramento, raw power is now being dressed up as “reform” and sent to the November 2025 ballot as Proposition 50. These two episodes show how lines on a map become lines of fracture for communities and fuel for partisan advantage.

Los Angeles has 15 City Council districts. When leaked audio of a private meeting among several council members emerged in 2022, it revealed how even small numbers of seats can produce intense fights. Then-Council President Nury Martinez, Councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Kevin DeLeon, and one other individual were caught discussing which politicians should “get” which neighborhoods, often with racial undertones that shocked the city.

Council President Martinez spoke of “little short dark people” in Koreatown and dismissed a fellow councilmember’s Black child in crude terms. The scandal went national. The New York Times reported that much of the recording focused on redistricting, how Latino political leaders could consolidate power by deciding “which politicians get which districts.”

What was exposed was less a democratic process than a dark, smoke-filled room horse-trade, a marketplace where communities were assets to be swapped.

The fallout was swift: Martinez resigned. Cedillo and DeLeon lost elections. The public saw behind the curtain – how supposedly concepts like “communities of interest” could be reduced to bargaining chips in the hands of politicians.

Fast-forward to 2025. Governor Gavin Newsom and Democrat leaders borrowed a page from the same playbook. On a party-line vote, they pushed through a bill that suspends California’s independent Citizens Redistricting Commission and hands the pen back to lawmakers. Their work product is Proposition 50, which voters will decide this November.

The mainstream media talks about the five additional Democrat congressional seats that may result from this gerrymander. But the reality runs deeper than that headline number.

Redrawing five districts doesn’t happen in isolation. To engineer them, mapmakers must ripple changes across the state, redrawing neighboring districts, moving lines that have long defined communities, and pitting constituencies against each other.

Under “normal” circumstances, maps are debated and discussed. Communities are given the opportunity to voice concerns about being separated or concentrated to dilute political power. That public airing didn’t happen.

As details become available, Latino and Black neighborhoods may find themselves divided to shore up partisan advantage. Individual cities or communities’ risk being splintered across multiple legislative districts.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who championed the original redistricting reform, has warned voters about the bait-and-switch: “Temporary exceptions rarely stay temporary.” Once politicians reassert control, the temptation to hold onto it becomes overwhelming.

The comparison between Los Angeles and Sacramento is striking. In Los Angeles, the tapes revealed insiders cutting deals in hushed tones. The harshness of the language and the raw politicking shocked voters.

In Sacramento, the process is more formal, cloaked in legislative procedure, but the instinct is the same: redraw maps to benefit those in power.

What both examples illustrate is how quickly gerrymandering boils down to power. To date, the fight over five congressional seats has dominated headlines. The true impact lies in the quiet slicing and dicing of communities, fracturing coalitions, diluting voices, and disenfranchising voters.

When politicians control the pen, representation becomes negotiable. Once that message takes root, even reforms as strong as California’s independent commission can be undermined.

The leaked tapes in Los Angeles and Prop. 50 are not separate scandals. They are chapters in the same book. They highlight how redistricting exposes the rawest truths about who holds power and the lengths they’ll take to keep it.

Matt Klink is owner and president of Klink Campaigns, Inc.