Ohio redistricting thread

[Unelectable Bystander]

At least hopefully it won’t matter in 2022 and there should be some dem gerrymanders that break sooner than later

[Unelectable Bystander]

Is there a standalone anti-gerrymandering bill that republicans are refusing to sign? My understanding is that it’s packaged with 25 different liberal priorities. You don’t get to take credit for supporting a popular position when you know that it has no chance of passing

[Unelectable Bystander]

Personally I think commissions are doing too much with trying to match the exact partisanship of a state with an Ohio 8-7 map or a Michigan 7-6 map or something like that. Why don’t they maximize competitive seats within geographical reason and let the voters pick? A hard 8-7 map feels like a bipartisan gerrymander. Like Ohio Dems should be able to win 10 seats if they make a miraculous recovery or the GOP should get 12/13 if it ends up going the way of Kentucky. Anybody else feel this way with commissions?

[Unelectable Bystander]

With all that being said, I've been playing around with the Ohio Senate map and the county rules do make it really annoying to get to the magic number of 15 blue districts. There are a number of obvious/pretty easy ones:

- 4 from Franklin
- 4 from Cuyahoga + Lake
- 1 from Summit
- 1 from Hamilton
- 1 from Montgomery
- 1 from Lucas

That still just leaves you at 12, though. The easiest one to do next would be another Hamilton blue district, which is fair, except you can't split Warren or Clermont and Butler needs a district wholly within it. I think the easiest thing to do here is put the Butler district in the east and then stretch a district from Preble south through a strip of leftover Butler in the west to the red parts of Hamilton, which lets you make the second Hamilton district blue. Due to county split rules in NEOH, the only real feasible way to get another blue district there is to combine the city of Akron with Portage, leaving the rest of Summit district narrowly blue. Finally, you have to compensate for not being able to do a Mahoning/Trumbull district; the only way I could find was to really cherrypick for the blue precincts in Toledo and combine that with Wood, Ottowa, Erie, and some of Sandusky for another narrowly blue district.

Honestly, both the county split and proportionality rules are dumb. You can tell what a fair map is without these strict rules.

Honestly, the provisions against county splits are a reasonable restraint on map makers doing whatever they want, willy nilly. When we don't have restraints, we start seeing absurdities such as cracking the suburbs of Columbus to elect exclusively Democrats, with the resulting disenfranchisement of Republican leaning suburban voters.

The "proportional" goal is absurd because the citizens of Cleveland are entitled to exactly two State Senators, and, if they do so 80-20 Democrat, as opposed the 54-46, that does not entitle them to elect another Democrat somewhere outside of Cleveland. The rest of the state is free to vote for whomever they want to represent them, and, not Cleveland.

Exactly right. Gerrymandering towards “fair” outcomes is still gerrymandering. There is no entitlement for any party to win a certain number of seats. Every citizen is entitled a vote, and it should not impact any other part of the state if there’s a bunch of democrats in Cleveland (or republicans in Amarillo for that matter)