Arizona’s Independent Redistricting Commission was created by proposition 106 and was meant to take the redistricting process out of the hands of partisan officials. The IRC was meant to engender fairness and transparency, eliminating the back rooms deals of the past. Unfortunately, approximately half the time the IRC has met has met behind closed doors, keeping the public in the dark. According to sources, the previous commission held almost three times as many meetings as the current IRC.

Even more alarming is, even with the little information that we do know, that the IRC is acting in a very partisan manner.

The IRC mapping firm selection was Strategic Telemetry. Strategic Telemetry is a progressive consulting firm with clients that include President Obama, SEIU, MoveOn.org, Gov Jerry Brown, and John Kerry. Apparently, Strategic Telemetry’s website has removed all references to previous clients. Strategic Telemetry is not the neutral bipartisan firm Proposition 106 intended.

Strategic Telemetry is not even a mapping firm, they help elect “progressive candidates.” In fact in the last Phoenix IRC meeting, Strategic Telemetry said they would need time to learn the software package standard in the mapping industry. Their previous specialty was campaign micro targeting.

Digging further into Strategic Telemetry’s history reveals their president Ken Strasma’s past. Strasma used to be the Policy Director for the National Committee for an Effective Congress. This organization claims on their website to be “one of the most influential political organizations having helped elect hundreds of progressive candidates to congress.” As previously mentioned, Strategic Telemetry used to brag about electing progressive candidates on their website. This information has now conveniently disappeared. But quick Google news searches reveal that Strasma was once considered one of the Democrats top strategists.

In fact the Obama campaign used Strasma's firm in each primary and battleground state and nationally, a total of 293 times.

It does not take too much searching to find that Strasma and Strategic Telemetry is Democratic through and through:

SPSS customer Strategic Telemetry, a Washington D.C.-based political consulting service, provides strategic advice and voter targeting services for progressive organizations and campaigns. Ken Strasma, president of Strategic Telemetry, founded the organization in 2003 and is considered to be a pioneer in the use of high-tech statistical modeling in Democratic campaigns.

In almost every news piece prior to the last few months, Strasma’s firm Strategic Telemetry is first and foremost introduced as a “Democratic consultant firm.”

Another problem is Strategic Telemetry’s questionable actions. The last commission drew all the maps without outside support. Now, all of Arizona’s voter data is going to Strategic Telemetry’s offices in New York, Wisconsin and Washington DC. Once again, as before it was in-house and transparent, it is now spread across multiple unaccountable actors. Why?

HERE IS THE REASON WHY!

Strasma knows micro targeting, the ability to look beyond Republican and Democrat voter registration advantages. Mcclatchy explains:

“Polling estimates how many in a group share a view. Micro-targeting predicts how individuals will behave. Micro-targeting doesn't rely on their answers to questions, as polling does. Rather, it analyzes hundreds of details about individuals' lives to predict their political behavior.

Married couples who use different last names, for example, are more likely to be Democrats. So are Volvo drivers. Active duty military personnel are stauncher Republicans than veterans. So are long-distance versus short-distance commuters.

All the findings can be sliced and diced, and the correlations improved with each election, producing precise and powerful results.”

If you know “which voters support a candidate, which are undecided, which care about particular issues, which will respond to persuasion and which will vote” you can secretly carve out a voting district that is more powerful than simple R+ or D+ advantages, making them appear neutral or even on its face but in reality be a solid partisan district with a virtual certainty of your desired outcome. In our case, electing Democratic candidates.

There are a lot of questions that all Arizonan’s should have for the “independent” IRC. It does not stop with the IRC’s actions but with the commission members themselves, whose supposed “independent” past are littered with partisan behavior. This is a big deal, Arizonans cannot be quiet.

The next public meeting is this Thursday, July 21 at 6:00pm. The address is below:

South Mountain Community College

SU 100 A

7050 South 24th Street

Phoenix, AZ  85402

Arizonans should attend, demanding answers from the commission.