Ohio pursues redistricting reform

The United States District Court ruled Wisconsin’s legislative map unconstitutional for the western part of the state a few weeks ago, bumping the case to the Supreme Court to reexamine whether gerrymandering violates the Constitution.

The Wisconsin case is giving people like Mike Brickner, the senior policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio, hope it will open up further challenges against unconstitutional maps in the state.

Redrawing of the congressional districts is an act that’s long been fought over, often with little resolution even from the Supreme Court. It occurs every ten years after the census for the state is taken. The party in control draws the map clean after each census, and the past two times Republicans had full control of the process.

In Ohio, a committee of lawmakers currently draws congressional districts and the state legislature approves them. Those who draw the districts would ideally give the districts voting power representative of the state, but that often doesn’t happen.

For example, if a state’s voting population is 30 percent Democrat and 70 percent Republican, in a perfect world, district drawers would make 30 percent of the districts Democratic and 70 percent Republican. Instead, they often draw districts in strange shapes so their political party has a higher proportion of voting power than the state reflects, which is known as gerrymandering.

 

 

Those in charge of the maps can draw the districts any way they want as long as they include the right number of people in the districts and make sure there is a minority representation in a district or two, said Rich Exner, a data analysis editor at cleveland.com.

The sixteen congressional districts in Ohio aren’t drawn in an obvious fashion. Ohio’s 9th district wraps around the top of the state, bordering Lake Erie, and extends from areas in Cuyahoga County all the way to Toledo. So residents in Ohio City, for example, have their Congress person living in Toledo, which is a little under two hours away.

“Gerrymandering is basically the drawing of political districts to favor the outcome of an election for one political party or the other,” Brickner said.

Out of the sixteen districts in Ohio, legislators drew twelve of them so Republicans were favored to win and the other four to favor the Democratic party. “So the result of the last redistricting is essentially, we don’t have competitive congressional races in Ohio,” Exner said.

 

 

Ohio is normally a purple state, meaning there is a balanced mixture of Democrats and Republicans within the state, but this past presidential election gave Republicans full power in the federal and state government. “It’s not one vote, one person. You don’t end up with competitive races,” Exner said. “That leaves a lot of people without a voice on Congress.”

 

 

While gerrymandering benefits politicians campaigning, it generally puts everyone else involved at a disadvantage.

State Representative Nick Celebrezze, a Democrat, said districts spread across cities make it difficult for Congress people to appropriately serve their districts, like in his hometown of Parma.

“In one school system we have three different state reps when constitutionally, the job of the legislature is to make sure that public education is being funded, and that makes it even more difficult,” Celebrezze said.

“There’s only one group of people that it favors, and that’s the politicians,” Exner said. “There’s no way that just on the surface you would draw lines like that if you were trying to have representation of the people.”

Brickner said he views gerrymandering as negative for our political system. He explained the nation doesn’t do well under single party control because there aren’t effective checks and balances.

Gerrymandering leads to “fewer people elected into office who are using rhetoric and coming with ideas that really focus on ideas of collaboration with the parties,” Brickner said. As an example, 100 percent of incumbents in Ohio’s congressional districts won their seats again in the 2016 General Election.

“And I think that’s the main reason why we’re at this political place nationally, not just in Ohio but nationally, where we have a lot of divisive rhetoric and there’s not a lot of cooperation between the political parties, and as a result, not a whole lot gets done,” said Brickner.

 

 

Brickner said there are laws in place that guide how redistricting should be done in order to avoid long snakelike districts that have people in completely different parts of the state in one district together. There are also provisions in federal law around racial discrimination that can occur with redistricting.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School, has maintained a whole website called All About Redistricting to teach his students about the redistricting process. On it, he says when redistricting, Ohio has to follow the constitutional equal population requirements and adhere to the guidelines of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 2 prohibits the drawing of district lines that “deny minority voters an equal opportunity ‘to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.’” 

“I think [gerrymandering] hinders because basically the government is set up so that the representatives are accountable to the people, but this removes the accountability to the voters,” Exner said.

Though redistricting is a heavily partisan act, it has opponents on both sides. Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, has advocated against it for years. Governor John Kasich, a Republican, was a big advocate for reforming the redistricting process when he ran for president this past election cycle.

“I support redistricting reform dramatically,” Kasich said in a Columbus Dispatch article. “We carve these safe districts, and then when you’re in a safe district, you have to watch your extremes, and you keep moving to the extremes.”

Not only are there redistricting maps for the U.S. House of Representatives (the congressional districts), but there are two other maps drawn that use the same process. The other two maps are for the state legislative districts, which are the Ohio House and the Ohio Senate.

Area politicians have taken some action to change the way legislative districts are drawn in the state. Celebrezze said former State Representative Vernon Sykes, a Democrat, proposed a bill in 2014 that brings a more transparent process to redistricting by using voting data and trends to make districts as close to a 50/50 proportion as possible. The bill passed overwhelmingly in 2015.

The bill gave gerrymandering opponents hope the same actions would be taken toward congressional districting, but so far nothing has been done, leaving the same process in place for the 2021 census. Celebrezze said to see a change, reform would have to be made at the federal level.

“I definitely think the way the lines are drawn is a huge issue,” Celebrezze said. “I think everybody kind of agrees that what’s best for the state of Ohio is to make more fair districts…that will benefit all of the residents. That’s when we can start taking ideology out of politics and just moving our state forward with some common sense legislation.”

https://twitter.com/crayolaaa48/status/809127193993416704

My #JMCRPP group's final story of the year: Analyzing the effect of gerrymandering on Ohio elections: https://t.co/zMhd5FiQ37

— Tyler Carey (@TC_CLE) December 14, 2016

Ohio is badly gerrymandered but won't be fixed anytime soon. Read more about how that affects you here via #JMCRPP https://t.co/24B2A9b1Ib

— Theresa Cottom (@Theresa_Cottom) December 15, 2016