As Ohio voters will soon discover, candidates for the U.S. House and state legislature are running this year in reconfigured districts. Once every decade, after each census, lines must be redrawn to equalize population. This time, the process was brutal. With Republicans firmly in control, the real goal was to maximize political advantage. As critics like to point out, the politicians chose the voters, not the other way around.
It would be tempting to dismiss complaints about the highly partisan way Ohio redraws districts as sour grapes. Ohio is a competitive state, so if one side seizes the advantage, it doesn’t last long. In the end, things will balance out, the argument goes.
The trouble is, when one party controls the process, the temptation is to draw districts moderates don’t have a chance of winning for an entire decade. This year, for example, Republicans created safe districts for themselves by packing Democrats into a smaller number of districts that are just as safe, if not more so.
Breaking this pattern, which encourages partisan excess over collaboration, is the goal of two groups. One is an a legislative task force, not yet fully formed, and is the other is a coalition led by the League of Women Voters of Ohio and Common Cause Ohio. While they seek the same result, they would accomplish the task of creating more compact and competitive districts in very different ways. It is possible that two amendments to the Ohio constitution will show up on the November ballot.
State Sens. Tom Sawyer, an Akron Democrat, and Frank LaRose, a Copley Township Republican, began their work before being appointed to the legislative task force. What they have in mind is a bipartisan panel that would draw new congressional and legislative boundaries, with approval from the minority party required. That would force compromise, resulting in districts that more accurately reflect the state’s competitive statewide elections.
Their plan would end the possibility that one party could control the creation of congressional districts (by controlling both houses of the state legislature). And it would end the role of the state apportionment board (dominated by the governor, auditor and secretary of state), which redraws legislative districts.
The League of Women Voters and Common Cause Ohio, joined by Daniel Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State, and Richard Gunther, a political science professor at Ohio State, want to drive politics out of the process.
They would like to see a panel of appellate judges select citizens, the process resulting in a 12-person commission composed of four Democrats, four Republicans and four not affiliated with either party. Rules would exclude politicians, lobbyists, large campaign contributors and other political insiders. More rules would set out criteria for compactness and competitiveness, as well as minimizing the splitting of local political boundaries, something already in the Ohio Constitution.
What the League of Women Voters and its allies fear in the Sawyer-LaRose approach is what they call “dual party” gerrymandering. In other words, a bipartisan (but still political) panel would compromise by carving out a more equal number of safe districts, Republican and Democratic. That would be better than what we have now, they admit, but would still leave room for improvement.
What Sawyer and LaRose understand is that getting that extra measure of fairness would come at the price of constructing an overly complex system, starting with judges (who run in partisan primaries in Ohio) finding citizens who are free of political influence. Even assuming the 12 commission members were as free of political influence as possible, you can bet your hanging chads that both parties would move heaven and earth to exert influence on the final product.
In the end, taking politics out of politics is an unrealistic goal. More, complex rules for creating congressional and legislative districts would invite complex arguments, and lawsuits, over their interpretation.
The best course would be a single amendment based on the Sawyer-LaRose model. Adding constitutional guidelines on compactness and competitiveness would help, but must be kept as simple and straightforward as possible. Such a plan would not be perfect. It would have the advantage of actually delivering a necessary improvement — more moderates willing to compromise when they arrive in Columbus and Washington.
Hoffman is a Beacon Journal editorial writer. He can be reached at 330-996-3740 or emailed at slhoffman@thebeaconjournal.com.
