Ohio’s unfair maps – Fixing state legislative gerrymandering
Gerrymandering rigs elections to favor one party’s lawmakers. It’s gotten quite bad for Ohio’s Congressional districts, but there are 2 other election maps we need to worry about: State Legislative maps which determine who our State Senators and State Representatives will be. If you care about laws regarding economic policy, guns, policing, education, pandemic policy, etc. then you should care about State lawmakers and how they are elected. If you care about the integrity of our elections, you should demand the end of gerrymandering.
Ohioans identify as 42% Republican and 40% Democrat, but that’s far from the balance of representation we see among the 132 lawmakers in the Statehouse. Better districts would give Ohioans better representation. New districts will be created this month with input from the public, so right now is the time to pay attention to this.
Our State Constitution has several new mapmaking requirements, but in this article we’ll focus on this one: “General assembly districts shall be compact.” Bizarre shaped districts are not compact, but before we can fix the problem we have to quantify it. I’ve written a tool to visualize how good or bad a district’s compactness is, and you can see the worst ones in dark purple or dark brown. When the new district maps are proposed this month, this tool will help ensure the districts are compact as constitutionally expected.
Page Contents
State Senate Districts
Ohio has 33 State Senators and the same number of districts. Even though Ohio is only a little more red than blue, 76% of State Senators are Republican: 25 to Democrats’ 8. That imbalance is largely due to gerrymandered districts.
Ohio has twice as many State Senate districts as US Congressional districts, so we should be able to achieve a similar high standard for a greater number of divisions. We can reasonably expect an Ohio district map to be 85% compact on average, with no district going below 60%, but the current Senate map falls far short of that.
The current State Senate map is just 69% compact for the average and median. There should be zero districts under 50%, but today we have 6 of them, which means those districts objectively fail the new compactness requirement. 3 of those are around an abysmal 30%. You can see the problem in this heat map, where the most acceptably compact districts are white and the worst ones are the darkest purple:
There should be no dark purple. Those districts meander around and separate voters with large gaps, designed to undemocratically guarantee political advantage.
The worst offender is District 25 east of Cleveland, with an appalling 28% rating due to having 3 nearly disconnected sections, each with its own indentations:
State House of Representatives Districts
Ohio has 3 times as many State Representatives as Senators, so there are 99 districts for them all. Republicans have 65% of the seats, 64 to Democrats’ 35. Again that’s well above party self-identification, so we’ll look to the district heat map to understand why:
Although much of the map is light, the dark brown districts spinning out of Columbus, dripping down from Cleveland and Akron, and stringing along through Cincinnati and Toledo are some of the most gerrymandered.
There are more House districts than counties in Ohio, so we should be able to create districts about as compact as our county map, but that’s not what the mapmakers came up with a decade ago. Ohio’s 88 county map is 97% compact, with no county dipping below 88%. In contrast, State House districts are 72% compact on average with a 73% median.
There should not be any districts under 50% compactness, but right now there are 14 State Rep districts lower than that, failing to reach bare minimum compactness. 31 districts, nearly 1 in 3, are lower than a reasonable expectation of 60%.
District 31 near Cincinnati is the worst House district. At only 36% compact, it looks like a crab with claws up on either side:
Districts should be as square as possible, not like inkblots that remind us of animal shapes. This is what election rigging looks like.
Constitutional Duty
Compactness is one of 3 standards that the redistricting commission “shall attempt” according to Ohio Constitution. This constitutional duty to try must be fulfilled by either delivering compact, representatively fair districts, or by providing a reasonable explanation for why it fell short. The absence of both may be evidence of neglect of this duty or even intentional gerrymandering, which could be brought before the Ohio Supreme Court to remedy.
Next Steps
The Ohio Redistricting Commission has begun the new mapmaking process as described by the Ohio Constitution. We’ll get Census data on 8/12/21 (delayed by the pandemic), and the Commission is expected to approve the new legislative maps by 9/1/21. That’s less than 3 weeks to agree on a 10-year map with bipartisan support. Otherwise the Commission may approve a 4-year map with a simple majority by 9/15/21.
That’s not much time to ensure we get fair districts. This process will have at least 3 public hearings. If you want to get involved to make our elections more fair, please visit Fair Districts Ohio or show up to tell the Redistricting Commission that you expect fair and compact maps. Tell them compact districts are measurable and expected by our Constitution.
References
The first part of my series on gerrymandering, regarding Congressional districts, can be found here: Measuring Ohio’s Gerrymandering Spike – A Proposal For Fair Election Maps
The measuring process is described in detail here. To summarize: you pick 2 random points in a district and see if the line connecting them crosses through another district. Repeat that 10,000 times to determine the percentage of lines that stay in-district and that’s your compactness rating.
Digital shape files for these districts were obtained from U.S. Census Bureau data located on the U.S. General Services Administration’s website data.gov here: Senate | House. TIGER/Line Shapefiles were converted to GEOJSON format via https://mapshaper.org/. The shape designated for Lake Erie was deleted using https://geojson.io/.
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About The Author
Optimist from Ohio
I've been interested in philosophy and science since I was young, and community service and civic engagement have became a passion since college. I was born in Ohio and have lived in different parts of the state most of my life. I'm optimistic about the potential for humanity to live in peace with one another, but only if we work to better understand our world and each other with reason, patience and compassion.
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