1/21/2024 0 Comments Gop stands for grabSomething started to seem amiss earlier this fall when the panel got to work trying to create the new state legislative districts. Both reforms also said districts could not unfairly favor or disfavor a political party. The 2018 amendment laid out a slightly different process for drawing congressional districts, but the overall idea was the same. If the panel couldn’t agree on new maps, they would only be in effect for four years, as opposed to the usual 10. The 2015 amendment dealt with drawing state legislative districts and gave a seven-person panel, comprised of elected officials from both parties, power to draw districts. In 20, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved two separate constitutional amendments that were meant to make mapmaking fairer. “I did not envision this being as shady.” “It’s incredibly difficult to get folks to say, ‘OK, we’re just gonna do this fairly after years and years and decades and decades of crafting districts that favor one political party,’” Catherine Turcer, the executive director of the Ohio chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group that backed the reforms, told me earlier this year. It underscores how challenging it is for reformers to wrest mapmaking power from politicians. Republicans have completely ignored them. What’s worse is that Ohio voters have specifically enacted reforms in recent years that were supposed to prevent this kind of manipulation. It’s an advantage that doesn’t reflect how politically competitive Ohio is: Donald Trump won the state in 2020 with 53% of the vote. Republicans control the legislature there and recently enacted new maps that would give them a supermajority in the state legislature and allow them to hold on to at least 12 of the state’s 15 congressional seats. Democrats have the power to draw maps in far fewer places, but they’ve also shown a willingness to use it where they have it, in places like Illinois and Maryland.īut something uniquely disturbing is happening in Ohio. Republicans are carving up Texas, North Carolina and Georgia to hold on to their majorities. Over the last few months, we’ve seen lawmakers in several states draw new, distorted political districts that entrench their political power for the next decade.
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