Ohio redistricting thread

[Torie]

This iteration should be pretty bullet proof with the Ohio Supremes. So, other than the obvious concession of Cincinnati to the Dems, it concedes making the Akron CD a swing CD, and a couple of others within range of the Dems in a good year. I don’t think there is an unduly favoring the Pubs case to be made of much merit with this puppy, because it hews quite meticulously to neutral redistricting principles, in my opinion. So, what is legally “bankable” for the Pubs is that they lose Cincinnati, pick up Toledo, the former OH-13 Ryan Dem sink that became more Pub over time but is still lean Dem, becomes a toss-up CD, and a southern Ohio Pub CD is erased. So, the net for the Pubs is a minus 0.5 CD.  After exchanging Toledo and Cincinnati, their loss of the 16th CD is offset in part by a Dem CD becoming swing.

The lines of each and every CD having legal talking points and justifications is the idea, right down to the precinct-by-precinct level. One thing that I liked is that the chop from the south into Summit County almost perfectly nests into the suburbs south of Akron (only about 200 residents off). Ditto the way OH-12 happens to nest well in its set of counties, and its set of municipalities in Franklin County without chopping into Columbus. Clean chops generate legal talking points.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/288b20a3-ab61-4b9d-a187-a46a85c8dba0

[Torie]

As to the above post, in what I consider a soft Dem gerrymander unless strict proportionality trumps all, is OH-14 as drawn as being the judicial Achilles Heel. A CD that takes in Youngstown and the burbs of Cleveland is ripe hanging fruit to pluck and consume in court or elsewhere. It is not obvious what the Dem gain is there, but it is there for the Asperger type obsessives, in the nature of another Dem seat. That is not going to fly with the Pub oriented Supremes. When you draw lines, think about just who the ultimate arbitrator is, almost all of which/who are partisan hacks, except for the odd court or person that is not, but even the bulk of them imo tend to be a partisan fail. But not perhaps all, cf MT. There the Dem tie breaker tossed her partisan affiliation into the dust bin. She honored her oath of office.

[Torie]

I appreciate the Ohio Supreme Court is Pub friendly, but I cannot image how that court could find that OH-01 as drawn is anything other than a text book case of the lines unduly favoring one party. Its butt ugly erosity has absolutely nothing going for it other than illegal Pubmandering. I am amazed the Pubs were that at once stupid and arrogant enough to go there. I guess we will find out the hack quotient of the Ohio high court soon enough. I hope they blow that CD out, if only to set a good example for the NYS high court, that will be charged with applying a remarkably similar NYS redistricting law.

The balance of the map I think is quite bullet proof, and I would note that they even eschewed tri-chopping any counties, including Franklin, thus rendering OH-15 rather more marginal than what would be the case otherwise. They also made OH-09 more marginal than it perhaps needed to be. How selfless of them.

[Torie]

Anyone got a shapefile for the new map?

Voila:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/fa470e25-db1b-45ac-ba7f-ea27792e3528

As to the complaint about the chopping of Summit, and the design of the chop does look suspicious,  in point of fact the populations dictate that Summit needs to be chopped, because even if OH-07 were removed from Summit, in exchange for Medina, OH-07 then has too many people, but if then removed from Cuyahoga to remedy that, has too few people, so no dice. What looks less like a gerrymander and a cleaner chop is OH-13 taking Stark and Summit ex of the northern suburbs, but it has the same partisan complexion as OH-13 in the enacted map, so no net Pub partisan advantage. Just one swing CD design is exchanged for another.



I then took on the more daunting task of how the Pubs could put lipstick of its OH-01 pig. The line of argument would be that hey it’s but a swing CD headed Dem, no big deal, and while it could be made lean Dem now, that would be at the cost of making otherwise merely lean Pub OH-10 more Pub sliding it into the pretty safe category (and in fact in a neutral map (click below) it does make OH-10 more Pub about 1.5 PVI points, so so far so good. That is the good Pub news. The bad Pub news is that it also makes OH-15 more Dem by about 2 PVI points, so the OH-01 Pubmander there still gives the Pubs a net “undue” advantage. It makes OH-01 swing instead of lean Dem, and switches OH-10 for OH-15 as the more marginal Pub CD.  And thus the Pub OH-01 defense is a fail because it has no defense, even with creative and imaginative lawyering. So sad for the Pubs as to OH-01.

I do think they are in good shape in NE Ohio however. They give the Dems a swing seat, which is all they should get per neutral redistricting principles, in addition to the Cleveland seat. It is just that the design of the OH-13 swing seat is different. It's generates more erosity than the other option, but is not more Pub.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/09d91f86-fb7f-4884-b467-6b5d3714a20e

[Torie]

Anyone got a shapefile for the new map?

Voila:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/fa470e25-db1b-45ac-ba7f-ea27792e3528

As to the complaint about the chopping of Summit, and the design of the chop does look suspicious,  in point of fact the populations dictate that Summit needs to be chopped, because even if OH-07 were removed from Summit, in exchange for Medina, OH-07 then has too many people, but if then removed from Cuyahoga to remedy that, has too few people, so no dice. What looks less like a gerrymander and a cleaner chop is OH-13 taking Stark and Summit ex of the northern suburbs, but it has the same partisan complexion as OH-13 in the enacted map, so no net Pub partisan advantage. Just one swing CD design is exchanged for another.



I then took on the more daunting task of how the Pubs could put lipstick of its OH-01 pig. The line of argument would be that hey it’s but a swing CD headed Dem, no big deal, and while it could be made lean Dem now, that would be at the cost of making otherwise merely lean Pub OH-10 more Pub sliding it into the pretty safe category (and in fact in a neutral map (click below) it does make OH-10 more Pub about 1.5 PVI points, so so far so good. That is the good Pub news. The bad Pub news is that it also makes OH-15 more Dem by about 2 PVI points, so the OH-01 Pubmander there still gives the Pubs a net “undue” advantage. It makes OH-01 swing instead of lean Dem, and switches OH-10 for OH-15 as the more marginal Pub CD.  And thus the Pub OH-01 defense is a fail because it has no defense, even with creative and imaginative lawyering. So sad for the Pubs as to OH-01.

I do think they are in good shape in NE Ohio however. They give the Dems a swing seat, which is all they should get per neutral redistricting principles, in addition to the Cleveland seat. It is just that the design of the OH-13 swing seat is different. It's generates more erosity than the other option, but is not more Pub.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/09d91f86-fb7f-4884-b467-6b5d3714a20e

The proposed swing Akron seat voted for Biden but your proposed one voted for Trump by 4.

Ah so it did (both maps were set on the composite score, not the POTUS 2020 score), thus making the Pub plan in NE Ohio even more compelling fair.  

So the Pub defense is the Mathismander defense. Gerrymandering is not gerrymandering if it creates competitive districts - the rest is noise. The only flaw in the ointment is that OH-15 is less competitive under the Pubmander than it would be otherwise, but per Trump 2020 numbers, the  difference is small. See below. So the governor has tipped us off as to the Pub defense. It's the Mathismander defense. Perhaps they should call Mathis in as an expert defense witness.  

Do you all now understand why being a lawyer is the best thing ever? Yes!

[Torie]

The Pub friendly court is not going to gerrymander for the Dems under the guise that fairness equals proportionality. Just like the Dem friendly court in NYS operating under the same law is not going to gerrymander for the Pubs using such an algorithm. How many Dems have been arguing that NYS needs to be gerrymandered for the Pubs? You see, this stuff is too subjective, and the stakes too high, and the complexity so great that spin artists have holes to drive through that make the Grand Canyon seem like a grove in a floorboard, for a species as defective as humans to do it. It's time to give it all up and give it to the black box.

Oh, and how about CA? 40% of the seats is like 20 seats for the Pubs. Where are they? How "fair" is that?  The commission is supposed to be fair right? What happened?

[Torie]

The Pub friendly court is not going to gerrymander for the Dems under the guise that fairness equals proportionality. Just like the Dem friendly court in NYS operating under the same law is not going to gerrymander for the Pubs using such an algorithm. How many Dems have been arguing that NYS needs to be gerrymandered for the Pubs? You see, this stuff is too subjective, and the stakes too high, and the complexity so great that spin artists have holes to drive through that make the Grand Canyon seem like a grove in a floorboard, for a species as defective as humans to do it. It's time to give it all up and give it to the black box.

Oh, and how about CA? 40% of the seats is like 20 seats for the Pubs. Where are they? How "fair" is that?  The commission is supposed to be fair right? What happened?

Funny how it's a "Pub Friendly Court" when O’Connor already ruled against GOP gerrymandering in 2012, and that was before the much more strict standards were passed with the reform.

No you can't always match the statewide vote but it certainly is a good barometer of where things are too distorted to be acceptable.   Giving the Republicans the potential to win 87% of the seats when they win 53% of the vote should be a huge red alarm and give reason to scrutinize the map.  

If the geography of the state dictates that that's unavoidable, fine, but if the map was designed to give that outcome then start looking at the written statements from Republicans on why they made the districts the way they did, and why they didn't get any bipartisan support for any of them.   Just looking at the map I can see a big handful of decisions that are extremely questionable.

I look forward to your comments when the NYS CD map comes out that has the same must not unduly favor stricture. I will leave it at that.  I understand your metric: within reason, gerrymander to move closer to proportionality, or at least with two reasonable choices, or a close case, always pick the one that moves towards proportionality. As long as you are being consistent, fair enough, although your metric is not quite the same as what the law says, but then "unduly" is itself a word that without further definition, is very subjective. It kind of leaves one in at least a neighborhood adjacent to the "I know it when I see it" definition of pornography.

[Torie]

The other option is "neutral" redistricting metrics that ignore proportionality, except perhaps when the choices are in equipoise. One can argue what neutral metrics are, but most agree that it involves erosity and jurisdictional chops at least. Some add urban versus rural, or census metro areas.  That is why good law drafting tries to be as meticulous as possible in defining words such as "unduly." I don't trust humans with this process because the biases are just too great, along with the stakes. I prefer the black box with the coding done far in advance, so one does not know what the outcome will be precisely from the code. I really do. The 100,000 posts on this board have totally convinced me of that, even without peaking out into the public square, which is arguably even worse.

[Torie]

Another fun issue is the concept of gerrymandering for the Dems to offset the partisan advantage the Pubs often get from the VRA, or at least the concept that persons of color should get elected even if Gingles is not formally triggered. Thus, there will "always" be a Cleveland seat that is a Dem pack. Someday, if not now, ditto for Columbus and Cincinnati.

The MI commission was busy doing that for the legislative seats due to the Detroit Dem pack and the need to elect blacks to the legislature.

[Torie]

Nice map overall, although I really dislike the placement of Union County with the rest of  OH-07. It spoliates the map for me. I presume you did it because you could not find a way to avoid another sizable county chop. I also think you violated Ohio law in two places. Can you guess as to what is in my mind here.

[Torie]

Nice map overall, although I really dislike the placement of Union County with the rest of  OH-07. It spoliates the map for me. I presume you did it because you could not find a way to avoid another sizable county chop. I also think you violated Ohio law in two places. Can you guess as to what is in my mind here.

Lorain and Butler?

Well that is an interesting answer. One of the names you mentioned is correct, and one is not. 

[Torie]

Clark. Your chops are not contiguous. If that is not the law, then I withdraw my comment nunc pro tunc. But if anal retentive enough, you might check it out.

[Torie]

https://davesredistricting.org/join/c591ee89-44f6-44d8-b150-e61fd3970249
Here is an alternative arrangement in SW OH. The rest of the map is unchanged.

Now you have spread the illegality to Butler. I looked up the language:

"and the portion of any congressional district that splits a county must be contiguous within that county."

[Torie]

One does not know if "unduly" means  merely not to gerrymander to favor one party, or it means one, within reason, must gerrymander against a party to make the party split on the CD's in the map more reflective of the party split in the state as a whole, to wit more proportional. I believe it will more likely be the former, but in any event the Pubs need good talking points for each choice that they make that does not make the map more proportional.

The language attempt to have one whole county in a district I interpret to mean where there isn't a whole county in a CD, that there were no reasonable map alternatives available to effect it.

And of course, as to Tim's map, there are it seems reasonable alternatives, which lose the Lorrain County chop, and switch it out for OH-13 chopping into Cuyahoga taking Chagrin Falls, and OH-15 taking a nip of Carroll County. So I suspect Tim’s map in this respect is most probably illegal.*

* Tim appears to have a  metric that ignores population deviations of less than 1,000 to lose chops, but that does not comport with the law either.



https://davesredistricting.org/join/0b5ee87b-55a0-446e-b4bf-e97cc3acf349

[Torie]

The Pub lawyer was pathetic. The best defense would have been that by respecting jurisdictional lines and compactness, while geography may favor the Pubs, it does not unduly favor the Pubs. If you don't tri-chop Cuyahoga, the districts will be less compact. That defense works reasonable well in fact, except for OH-01 where there is no defense. There you are left with arguing that a competitive district cannot be considered as unduly favoring one party as a per se matter, which is not persuasive. So the Pubs there are the hogs to get slaughtered.

The Pub lawyer should have put that CD into a different basket in the defense. Well even if you find OH-01 unduly favors one party, because it cannot be explained away by jurisdictional lines, or compactness or anything else, that does not apply to any of the other competitive CD's that the Pubs drew, that can be explained by jurisdictional lines and compactness. There is no requirement that the Pubs gerrymander to favor the Dems under some proportionality rule that does not exist. If that had been the intent, then the law would have been written to ban redistricting favoring one party, as opposed to unduly favoring one party. The Pubs were badly out-lawyered here. They had some hick local yokel, while the Dems had Covington and Burling, the most high powered law firm in DC.

The Pubs of course when they drew the lines should have had talking points for each CD, using metrics that were not partisan. DeWine's late term fix of competitive CD's as a magic bullet defense was not enough.

[Torie]

The GOP is really fighting a losing battle in the Cincinnati area. They should’ve just drawn a compact Hamilton seat and not have jeopardized their entire map in the process.

It was the desire to over satisfy incumbents. A clermont + Hamilton minus the black suburbs would be pretty similar to the Pittsburgh seat and a bit more defendable.



The suburban seat here is problematic for the future as its only Trump +12 and trending left quickly but it should be fine to 2024 obviously. Still a gerrymander although one could stretch  it to reasonably compact

If there's one thing that has been repeatedly underestimated on this board, tbh, it's been the willingness of legislators to accept the desires of incumbents.

Yeah now these incumbents can cry when they don't have any seats to run in instead of just taking the above.

Yeah, unlike the VA Special Masters, who "told" incumbents to go F themselves.

[Torie]

Hahaha, rip Chabot. Hopefully the OHSC orders a full congressional remap as well and we get another winnable seat out of Cleveland, Columbus, or both.

If the court does the same thing, and makes proportionality under Section 6 their focus of scrutiny on the congressional plan, then we are all but guaranteed to see the Akron, Cincinnati, and second Columbus seats, as well as a much better Toledo one.

As to CD's, the exact same not unduly favors language is in the Florida and NY Constitutions. If Ohio goes for a strict proportionality metric, and the other two state high courts do not, that would be ... interesting. When it comes to redistricting, imprecise feel good words are ... highly problematical.

[Torie]

Below is a link to the decision. The court got the legal standard exactly right*, but then went hackish big time**. Bottom line is that, by applying inconsistent standards, in addition to Cincy, the Dems are going to get another seat in NE Ohio and the Columbus burbs, so that Badger will not have to further endure the horror of being represented by a Pub Congressperson. So instead of getting the expected one seat, the Dems are going to pick up three more for a huge win, at least absent a red wave.

https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Clerk/ecms/#/caseinfo/2021/1428

And this will all be done again in 4 years.

*If neutral redistricting criteria hewing to the specific line drawing rules give the Dems more seats than what they got, and what they got is not proportional, you have an unduly favoring problem.

**I don't think hewing to neutral redistricting criteria give the Dems another seat in NE Ohio and the Columbus burbs. Instead they get a another swing seat in NE Ohio.

[Torie]

The map above is actually what the Dem experts are demanding that the court majority is channeling, although NE Ohio instead of two marginal seats might be one more lean Dem and one more lean Pub. Well done.

[Torie]

Well done.

I mean that general geographic alignment of the districts has basically been the online and activist consensus for a while now, it's no surprise the court wants something like it. I seen the map with various alterations at the margins probably more than 20 times. Here's my third and most recent version - note that it features a barely  Trump Toledo seat rather than a barely Biden one, cause I wanted to put Erie inside the Cleveland grouping.

Lakewood is more dense than Cleveland itself. It clearly belongs with Cleveland. Placing the far south of Cuyahoga before Lakewood is pretty similar to what the GOP did in Cinci although not as bad.

You can argue that stuff all you want, but since the imposed standard is now partisan fairness, sinking a community Biden won by 50 points with the Cleveland seat is no longer going to cut it when it can be used to help facilitate a new swing seat. So you now want to put GOP areas with Cleveland before Dem ones.

That is not the legal standard set by the court. The legal standard is to use neutral redistricting principles, to the extent there is a lack of proportionality. So turn off the partisan numbers and do what the law requires and otherwise comports to neutral redistricting principles. This is not Michigan where you gerrymander in favor of one party to make it fair. If that is what the court intended, at least in their ruling, then it would have said "unduly" means anything otherwise legal that fails to move towards proportionality. But they did not write that.

The above is the standard. What the court finally does may may make a mockery of their own standard. In that case maybe the court will finally have to draw the map itself. If that is the case, it may well be in place for only one election cycle. The Pubs should not draw a map that makes a mockery of the court's own standard.

[Torie]

Below is a link to the decision. The court got the legal standard exactly right*, but then went hackish big time**. Bottom line is that, by applying inconsistent standards, in addition to Cincy, the Dems are going to get another seat in NE Ohio and the Columbus burbs, so that Badger will not have to further endure the horror of being represented by a Pub Congressperson. So instead of getting the expected one seat, the Dems are going to pick up three more for a huge win, at least absent a red wave.

https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Clerk/ecms/#/caseinfo/2021/1428

And this will all be done again in 4 years.

*If neutral redistricting criteria hewing to the specific line drawing rules give the Dems more seats than what they got, and what they got is not proportional, you have an unduly favoring problem.

**I don't think hewing to neutral redistricting criteria give the Dems another seat in NE Ohio and the Columbus burbs. Instead they get a another swing seat in NE Ohio.

I read most and skimmed through some, but I hope you're not trying to defend the dissent in this. The dissent basically said that despite passing a new constitutional amendment, it's beyond the Court's capability to discern or remedy violations. The dissent didn't even see anything wrong with Hamilton County. If you want hackish, the dissent basically ignores the will of the voters in passing restrictions on redistricting.

I'm a hardliner as to interpreting the law, but that doesn't mean common sense goes out the window.

I didn't even read the dissent, so no, I am not defending it.

[Torie]

Below is a link to the decision. The court got the legal standard exactly right*, but then went hackish big time**. Bottom line is that, by applying inconsistent standards, in addition to Cincy, the Dems are going to get another seat in NE Ohio and the Columbus burbs, so that Badger will not have to further endure the horror of being represented by a Pub Congressperson. So instead of getting the expected one seat, the Dems are going to pick up three more for a huge win, at least absent a red wave.

https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Clerk/ecms/#/caseinfo/2021/1428

And this will all be done again in 4 years.

*If neutral redistricting criteria hewing to the specific line drawing rules give the Dems more seats than what they got, and what they got is not proportional, you have an unduly favoring problem.

**I don't think hewing to neutral redistricting criteria give the Dems another seat in NE Ohio and the Columbus burbs. Instead they get a another swing seat in NE Ohio.

I read most and skimmed through some, but I hope you're not trying to defend the dissent in this. The dissent basically said that despite passing a new constitutional amendment, it's beyond the Court's capability to discern or remedy violations. The dissent didn't even see anything wrong with Hamilton County. If you want hackish, the dissent basically ignores the will of the voters in passing restrictions on redistricting.

I'm a hardliner as to interpreting the law, but that doesn't mean common sense goes out the window.

I was going to post about this, the dissent basically said that there's no way for the court to define unduly favored or any of the other rules in the amendment so the court should just outright ignore those sections.   Then they say that the Republicans followed the law by making competitive districts where safe D districts should've been and that they minimized county splits but the splits being focused on Democratic areas doesn't show bias.

Also they say it's basically a mystery if a Safe D district in Hamilton county is possible and that the Republicans drawing a competitive district there is the best that could be hoped for (WTF?)

and the majority points to no evidence showing that it was possible to split Hamilton County only once while also keeping Cincinnati intact and attempting to have a whole county within that congressional district

Yeah, they didn't point to evidence for that because it's actually stupid obvious it's possible to do so.   But earlier in the dissent they state this -

Begin with a point of agreement by all: of Ohio’s 15-seat allotment,
six districts will be “solidly Republican” and two will be “solidly Democratic,”
majority opinion at ¶ 43. The two blue districts encompass Cleveland and
Columbus. The six red districts occupy more rural regions of the state. These eight
nonnegotiable districts are the result of political geography—Republican voters
disperse more uniformly about the state while Democratic voters cluster in urban
centers—and only an extreme gerrymander could alter this arrangement.

So it's impossible to draw more than two deeply democratic districts but there needs to be evidence that it's possible to draw a district entirely in Hamilton County. 

And they say that Summit County needs to be split the way it was because Akron had to be kept together and Summit doesn't have enough population for it's own district, so a competitive district is all that's possible.  Keep Summit in one district and it solves both problems.

The dissent is devoid of even basic math, let alone common sense or logical thinking.   

It basically points to the minimized county splits and then says "Republicans made competitive districts out of areas that would be Safe D districts so the map is fair because there's no evidence that anything else is possible."

The dissent as described by you is just channeling the Pub talking point that you can't have an unduly favoring map if districts are competitive because competitive districts as a per se matter can't be deemed to be unduly favoring one party. So you can screw the other party out of safe or lean CD's to you heart's content as long as the needle is moved just to the competitive line (however that is defined) rather than all the way to it's safe for Jim Jordan line. And yes, that talking point is ludicrous. Apparently the brain drain in Ohio has been almost as bad as that in Iowa.

[Torie]

Omg just draw a Hamilton county seat ffs, is Steve Chabot really worth all this?

One assumes that what is going on is that if the legislature passes a map, then the Pubs are stuck with it for the decade, but if a court draws it, when there is a court personnel change, the Pubs can draw the map they want soon thereafter.

But yeah it is odd, particularly when they threw in the towel on Akron, by drawing a CD with all of Summit plus the city of Canton but sans the hyper Pub parts of Stark, rather than all of Stark plus Akron but excluding a bunch of marginal territory in Summit, which is a very attractive looking CD actually, more attractive than what they drew.

[Torie]

Redistricting really does bring out the worst in people. And in this case unlike in NC where the court was making up law (imo), in Ohio, the woman is actually trying to follow the law.

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/03/18/ohio-republicans-want-impeach-maureen-oconnor-over-redistricting/7088996001/

[Torie]

Now you know why Shakespeare wrote "kill all the lawyers." It is sh*t shows like this why I am not very impressed at all with my guild. Oh the tangled webs we weave. All too often the complex and justice do not have much nexus, because our species is flawed. I am lived it, up close and personal.