Isn't Ohio one of the states that repeatedly used illegal districts in blatant defiance to court rulings?
Yup. They just kept submitting maps that were getting rejected for being unconstitutional and eventually the court just had to let it go because you can't just not have an election and they couldn't do anything else about it.
We need to add some kind of recourse to the rules. Something like "if you can't put together a constitutional map by the deadline, then the minority party gets to submit one for consideration instead".
How about putting them in fucking jail for breaking the law?
I'd be down with that, FartsWithAnAccent! But the constitution would have to be updated with that clause. Right now, it just says that they have to do a thing without specifying what happens if they don't do that thing
Or they could just be held in contempt of court because it was a court order that that blatantly disregarded.
Unfortunately they were only ordered to draw a new map, which they did. So they did indeed "comply". The court can't tell them how to draw the map, only that it needs to be redrawn.
It's not a particularly smart system
Like if you can't make a constitutional map, or special election for either replacing you, (the elected officials) or a panel of people to make a map. But also I semi wonder if you could just have a computer do it. Just try to split up counties as close to 50/50
Agreed, but the goal shouldn't be 50/50, but to properly represent the people. Each area is different, but generally speaking, urban areas should form a district with other urban areas, and rural areas should form a district with other rural areas.
If the goal is to match the statewide partisan split, we should just move to proportional representation.
Fair. But the. The government doesn't do that too greatly either though. But I do agree and that's my bad.
So you’re telling me a suburb of Dayton shouldn’t share a congressperson with Cincinnati?
Maybe, but Dayton and Cincinnati are kinda close. In my state (Utah), it would be like Cleveland and Cincinnati sharing a representative. All of our districts share a piece of the main urban center, to the point where all of our representatives could live within a mile or so of each other.
Ohio's maps don't look obviously bad, but there are certainly some sus districts.
Right, there are some legitimate reasons to not split everything by population or affiliation. This can end up destroying the voice that some isolated minority communities have.
It's a super hard problem to find the best solution, but also super obvious when people are proposing shitty solutions for obviously immoral reasons. It would be a decent first step if we could just get to where we don't have an obviously shitty, and ultimately unconstitutional, map
That's certainly possible, but it's probably better than the alternative.
I'm in Utah, and we passed an initiative where an independent commission proposes maps for the state legislature, and the legislature ignored all of them and passed one where every district includes a part of SLC to fracture the liberal vote. So now all four representatives could live within a mile or so of each other.
Yeah is something like 65/35 Rep/Dem, yet no district is feasible to win by a Democrat.
Yep. Our votes are slightly better than meaningless when it comes to legislatures
Dunno, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Republicans know that if they can't cheat, they can't win elections.
So of course they will keep on cheating.
Citizen led redistricting isn't all that great. Michigan just went through their first redistricting and it was just as much of a shit show. There were attendance issues, potential open meetings act violations, the whole thing went way over budget, and majority minority districts got eliminated. Republicans sued to prevent it from ever happening, and Democrats sued after the maps came out.
Overall the balance did swing from Republican favored to slightly Republican favored. Democrats did win a majority for the first time in a long time, but they also faced historically bad Republican candidates.
Yeah, I can believe that, it's as rife for corruption and the other problems as any other system. Honestly I don't know if there is a way to do fair voting maps, at least one that can't get hijacked by zealots.