On May 8, 2018, Ohioans will get to vote on Issue 1, a proposal reached by politicians in Ohio to make Ohio districts fairer.
At the congressional level, Ohio is currently one of the most gerrymandered states in the country with four Democratic districts and 12 Republican districts. Republicans received 75 percent of the power at the federal level in a state that voted for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012.
As it stands, the current system is broken.
To address this, people organized as Fair Districts Ohio and worked to get a ballot proposal on the ballot for 2018. Republicans did not want the Fair Districts Ohio proposal on the ballot in November 2018. To try to head this off, they tried to pass a terrible proposal which would keep control in Republican hands. Fair Districts said decided they couldn’t support it, and went ahead with the ballot initiative.
This brought Republicans back to the table to support a much better proposal. This better proposal is Issue 1.
Because this proposal was a compromise with the Republican-controlled legislature, however, some of the questions Democrats and progressives frequently ask are: Can we trust it? Is this a good idea?
While it’s not perfect, it’s pretty darn good. Here are the details, and why we should pass Issue 1.
The last time the state General Assembly adopted congressional maps was in 2011, which followed the 2010 U.S. Census. Republicans controlled all three branches of state government: the House Assembly, Senate, and governor’s office. Republicans pushed through the current gerrymandered map with the support of only four of 50 (8 percent) legislative Democrats in the Assembly.
The proposed amendment would amend the Ohio Constitution to establish a process for congressional redistricting.
Highlights of the plan include:
- No congressional district map shall be drawn to favor or disfavor a political party or candidates.
- Each district will be nearly equal in population (one person, one vote).
- The plan shall minimize the splitting of counties, municipalities, and townships, and no county shall be split more than once.
- Districts shall be geographically contiguous and compact.
- The Voting Rights Act and other state and federal laws that protect minority representation shall be respected.
- Representational fairness is required. This means that the statewide percentage of districts leaning toward each of the two major parties shall closely correspond to the partisan preferences of the voters of Ohio as measured by the statewide proportion of votes in state and federal partisan statewide general elections over the previous 10 years.
These are great guidelines for drawing districts, and should prevent abuse. One of the highlights is minimizing the splitting of counties, municipalities, and townships. This should prevent abuse like the “snake by the lake,” Ohio’s 9th congressional district which runs from Toledo to Cleveland. People in such a crazily drawn district often have little in common with each other and everyone becomes underrepresented in Congress.
Having the guidelines in the state Constitution allows abuse to be challenged in courts, making for another check and balance.
One worry is that there could still be abuse if the groups cannot come to agreement. This is because the last steps of the process eliminate some of the checks and balances. Here are the steps in the proposed new process:
- The legislature can approve the maps with a super majority (60 percent), but only if at least 50 percent of the members of the minority party vote yes.
- If Step 1 fails, the work goes to a new commission made up of the governor, secretary of state, auditor, and four appointments from the legislature. This commission could set the map, but only with votes from at least two members of each party.
- If Step 2 fails, it goes back to the legislature, where approval from 60 percent of the members is needed. This time only one-third of the minority members need approve.
- If Step 3 fails, the legislature can approve a map for four years—instead of 10 years—by a simple majority.
This is vastly improved over the previous process, especially with the prior requirements written into the state Constitution.
Why do I trust this proposal?
The short answer is that in politics, you should always be wary. The only thing that pressured the legislature into changing their rigging was a potential ballot initiative.
Fair Districts Ohio now supports the initiative because they understand that it would still have been a lot of work to get the remaining 100,000 signatures to get the issue on the ballot in November. Not only that, but the requirements specify certain numbers of signatures needed in each county. In some of the more rural counties, it’s difficult to accomplish this goal. Basically, there wasn’t any certainty of getting the issue on the ballot.
The Republican legislature understands that people are not happy with the current rigged system, unhappy enough so that they’re organizing to end the situation. This pushed them to act. And it pushed them to what looks like a much better system with much less chance of abuse.
This is why I will vote for Issue 1 and also encourage others to do the same. But cautious optimism must be paired with sustained pressure, because pressure from citizen groups was crucial to the legislature taking action.
David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy (print or ebook).