WHY VOTERS HAVE NO CHOICES ARNOLD COULD RUIN GERRYMANDERING IN CALIFORNIA'S LEGISLATURE.

Byline: JILL STEWART Capitol Punishment

TO the embittered liberals who say Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's fund raising of $73,000 a day proves he's owned by special interests, my response is: Dear Guv, please keep raking in far more dough than Gray Davis.

Davis used his riches to re-elect himself. Schwarzenegger spends his cash fighting for issues on the ballot. Big difference - and a crucial one now that Schwarzenegger may launch the Political War of the Decade.

If Schwarzenegger decides to fight the sick scheme known as ``safe seats,'' it will become an epic struggle against vast institutions who have ensured that voters get zero choices at the ballot - though few Californians realize it.

``Safe seats'' are why none of California's 53 Congressional seats changed parties on Nov. 2 - a prediction made months before we voted. In Sacramento, ``safe seats'' are why none of 100 Assembly or Senate seats changed party hands.

We've become a despotic regime that predetermines its leaders. Bob Stern, president of the Center for Government Studies, says the ``safe seats'' scam gripping California is ``worse than the Soviet Politburo used to be.''

Eight times during the past 80 years, voters were asked to upend the awful system. Each time, voters were tricked by politicians into preserving it.

``They've used actors like Jack Lemmon to fight reform,'' says Stern. ``But what if the reform side does the same thing this time, and ends up with Arnold Schwarzenegger on its side? Ha! I think it could finally succeed.''

Most voters think that when they vote, they do so within a community of interest, based on geography, known as a ``voting district.''

How quaint. In fact, the Legislature now uses computer programs to painstakingly divide voters block by block. They don't divide us based on shared communities, but on party registration. Republicans and Democrats are carefully separated, stuck in bizarrely shaped ``voting districts'' controlled by just one party.

Then, during the spring primary, the party that controls the rigged ``district'' carefully spoon-feeds its corralled voters a pre-selected candidate awash in special-interest campaign funds. Usually, this well-funded party hack beats any normal person who hoped to represent the party. In November, because the district is stacked, the party hack who won the primary can't lose. Even a bad candidate.

One wag uttered this Orwellian maxim: ``Voters no longer pick the candidate.'' Instead candidates ``pick their voters.'' How creepy.

Upending this corrupt system falls to Schwarzenegger, a Republican. The Democrats won't act since the majority party draws up the phony voting districts. Just as in Texas, where a gleeful Republican majority drew horrifically gerrymandered districts, Democrats carve up California. Democratic leaders in Sacramento right now are loudly crowing because no seats changed hands on Nov. 2.

They're so far gone that they openly celebrate this attack on democracy.

Republican consultant Allan Hoffenblum notes, ``Schwarzenegger will be opposed by every single incumbent politician from both sides of the political aisle because they all want to preserve their jobs, plus the usual Democratic special interests such as the Service Employees International Union, the AFL-CIO, the trial lawyers, the nurses association - you name it!''

The special-interest crowd abhors voting districts that include a rich mix of voters, thus forcing candidates to compete over ideas.

Can't have that.

The late Jack Lemmon got sucked in by powerful status-quo Democrats. He made a commercial claiming that if the power to draw up their own districts were taken from legislators and handed to an independent panel of judges, the judiciary could be corrupted. Lemmon could never explain just how.

Recalls Hoffenblum, Former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown ``later called that Lemmon TV spot one of the greatest con jobs of all time. Willie loved it.''

In 1991, the California Supreme Court ordered an independent panel to create geographically true voting districts. In the resulting mixed districts, Democrats and Republicans were forced to compete head-on.

This temporary outbreak of democracy in California inspired non-hacks to run for office between 1992 and 2000. Californians, largely unaware of why they suddenly had choices, elected a wave of moderate Republicans and Latino Democrats.

Tony Quinn, co-editor of the California Target Book, a nonpartisan elections analysis, notes: ``People should remember that Latinos were elected to the Sacramento legislature (in the 1990s) in large numbers due to court plans - and never due to letting legislators draw (their own) districts.''

Republicans didn't shut out Latinos. California's top Democratic leaders did that.

In 2001, the power reverted to scheming legislators to draw their voting districts. Naturally, they created districts that look like demented Rorschach tests, and one-sided ballots.

The embittered lefties who want to take Schwarzenegger down a notch should pray that he keeps out-raising Davis. He'll need every dollar. Because those in power have demonstrated, for decades, that they will do anything to shut others out. Especially the voters themselves.