Contest shows real hope for better elections

8:19 PM Wednesday, June 24, 2009

How would Ohio’s legislative districts be drawn if politicians didn’t control the process?

Answer: Much better. In every important way. No trade-offs.

That’s the only possible conclusion you can draw from an exercise just finished by advocates of reform, with some help from the secretary of state’s office. The exercise is one of the more creative efforts to come out of Columbus in a while.

Specifically, reformers — including the League of Women Voters — held a contest to draw congressional districts.

Under Ohio’s existing system, districts for the state Legislature are drawn by a commission that is completely controlled by one political party or the other, depending on which party holds what statewide offices at the moment. Meanwhile, congressional districts are drawn by the Legislature and approved by the governor.

Political calculations dominate in both cases.

The reformers said, let’s start by setting up some nonpartisan guidelines:

• Districts are better that have lines that don’t squiggle all over the place and are relatively compact.

• They’re better if they respect county lines and other jurisdictional boundaries.

• They’re better if they can be won be either party, rather than being so dominated by voters of a particular party that the other party doesn’t even make a real effort.

• And they’re better if the state ends up with Democratic and Republican officeholders in rough proportion to the votes the two parties get statewide in a given year.

Finally, the reformers said, let’s find a way to define each of these criteria precisely, in numerical terms, and let’s assign equal weight to each. Then let’s hold a map-drawing contest, letting the public participate. The idea would be to get the highest score on the four criteria when totalled.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s office agreed to administer the contest. That entailed holding a class about how to use a software program that is widely used for redistricting purposes.

Entrants were then asked to draw a congressional map based on the 2000 Census. By law, maps are redrawn every 10 years, right after the Census. The lines can’t be redrawn now. The idea was just to see how they might have been drawn in the first place.

Only 14 people actually submitted maps. Of those, only 11 complied with all the rules. But that was plenty to make the point:

Of those 11, all scored higher than the actual existing map, not only as to total score, but on all four criteria taken individually.

In other words, no criteria had to be seriously sacrificed in order to meet other criteria. Many skeptics of reform (and even supporters) have worried that making districts competitive would require making them weird and squiggly. Nope.

Reformers are highlighting the three highest-scoring entries (including one by a Republican state legislator from Illinois). These maps generally don’t have the oddities of the existing map: the gash in northeastern Montgomery County that was taken out of the 3rd District (Rep. Mike Turner’s); the skinny district that runs up the eastern border of the state; the division of Franklin County into three districts; the oddly shaped 13th District. All these things were drawn for political reasons.

(To see all the maps, and more detailed explanations of all the rules and outcomes, go to www.ohioredistricting.org.)

What happens now? The Ohio Constitution has to be changed. It should specify the criteria of a good map, much as the reformers have done.

(Reformers say that a state commission shouldn’t necessarily have to pick the single highest-scoring map, but should have to choose from among the highest or come up with one that matches them.)

Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, has a proposal pending to create a bipartisan commission. He and other reformers ought to be able work something out.

The following gets said every time redistricting reform is proposed; nevertheless, it does seem true now: The time is right. That’s because nobody can say which party has the most to lose from reform. Either party might end up in control of state legislative redistricting after 2010.

Any proposal must be thoroughly bipartisan, because 60-percent majorities are needed in both houses of the Legislature to put something on this November’s ballot.

Nobody is attempting the other way of getting something on the ballot — gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures. That’s partly because all sides have concluded — from experience — that the redistricting reform goes nowhere if both parties aren’t onboard from the start.

What’s necessary now is wide distribution of the outcome of the contests, fast study and political leadership.

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