I just wanted to go to work this morning.
On the way to work though, I made the mistake of stopping for a bagel, and the following stared up at me as I was getting coffee.
While I'm glad the Cincinnati Enquirer is so interested in "protecting the vote," I can't help but wonder why they're not going after the much bigger voter fraud.
In 2012, while 47.5% of the state voted Democratic in Congressional elections, Republicans won 12 out of 16 Congressional seats.
To put this in perspective, 2.3 million people voted Democratic and won 4 seats while 2.5 million people voted Republican and won 12 seats.
That means it took 212,000 people to elect a Republican and 576,000 people to elect a Democrat.
Below the fold: links to the research and a few thoughts on what we can do.
This is a widely known problem so I'm not going to present much more detail.
The only other stat that might be useful is that if you consider Democrats won 25% of the seats with 47.5% of the state Congressional vote, this is the equivalent of 1,091,166 votes being thrown in the trash.
Yet the Cincinnati Enquirer is publishing a front page story on an issue which didn't affect a single election. Yes, things likely could be better at polling stations. But no elections were affected by this polling station negligence.
Statewide Republicans, however, purposefully and legally dumped over a million Democratic votes in the trash and the Enquirer prints nothing.
Data from the Cleveland Plain Dealer
The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a great story on Ohio gerrymandering back in November.
It contained this amazing graphic which shows how state officials stuffed huge amounts of the Democrats into 4 crazily drawn districts so Republicans would win the rest:
The other affect gerrymandering has on districts is that it eliminates competitive districts. Basically, Republicans have little chance in the Democratic districts and Democrats have little change in Republican districts.
In other words, the people who determined this election were the small group of people who drew the districts, not the voters.
None of these officials is therefore technically responsible to voters but only to a small group of people in the statehouse who draw the districts.
The game is rigged.
And state officials get away with it because it goes largely unreported in places like Cincinnati.
What to Do
Dizzydean wrote this excellent article here at dKos with these 3 things you can do if this is happening in your state. He writes:
There are three ways to try to change the status quo:
(1) get an initiative on the ballot
(2) get legislation passed at the state level
(3) get a court order forcing a change
Dizzy, the
petition has been filed with 430,000 signatures, more than enough votes to get it on the ballot!
Contacts at the Cincinnati Enquirer
I would add to Dizzy's list that we should be asking news organization like the Cincinnati Enquirer why they choose to focus on voter issues with no actual election impact and why they choose to completely ignore stories where over 1,000,000 votes are thrown away:
Sharon Coolidge, reporter for the story: scoolidge@enquirer.com
Carolyn Washburn
cwashburn@enquirer.com
Twitter: @CarolynWashburn
513-768-8551
Editor and Vice President of News
Cincinnati Enquirer
Phone: 513-721-2700
Any other thoughts on what we can do to fight gerrymandering are welcome!
8:14 AM PT: UPDATE: As a couple of folks have posted in the comments, the petition mentioned was for the 2012 election and the issue was defeated in November. Thanks to those who brought up and apologies for not catching this as I was writing before work this morning.