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INTRODUCTION

Democracy is the bedrock of modern government. The state has authority to enact and enforce laws on citizens only because it is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

In a representative democracy, citizens choose to not involve themselves in the daily decisions of government. Rather, they elect representatives to govern on their behalf. The legitimacy of the laws passed by those representatives depends upon the legitimacy and integrity of the elections process that selects government officials.

Democracy is hard work. History has shown that all too often, men and women in positions of power would rather manipulate the elections process to maintain their power unfairly rather than continually winning over the hearts and minds of their fellow citizens. Attempts to rig election results have ranged from stuffing ballot boxes to intimidating certain citizens from voting to bribing voters for their support.

Each violation in the spirit of democracy brings with it a new reform aimed at tightening the rules to ensure that elections results truly represent the will of the voters. The secret ballot reduced voter bribery and intimidation; non-partisan election boards helped oversee the balloting and vote counting process to prevent ballot stuffing and other election fraud.

The United States Constitution establishes that the House of Representatives shall reflect the populations of each state. To accomplish this, a census is taken every ten years and House seats are apportioned to each state based on the size of their population. This re-apportionment process has historically meant that states that either gained or lost congressional seats had to redraw political districts to reflect the new size of their congressional delegation.

One abuse of power that is receiving renewed attention is the intentional drawing of political districts to advantage incumbents or partisan interests. The way political boundaries are drawn fundamentally determines how competitive elections will be, how accurately they will represent people’s political beliefs, and how well they will preserve local geography of cities, townships, and counties. Unscrupulous politicians who would rather cheat their way into office than win a difficult election have practiced this illicit process, known as gerrymandering, for more than a century. The word “gerrymander” actually comes from 1812 when a Massachusetts Governor named Eldridge Gerry drew a district that looked like a salamander in order to place his opponents into one district.

The most egregious historical abuse of political districts was when some districts contained considerably more voters than others. Racist officeholders used this technique to under-represent African-American citizens, creating districts that contained large numbers of black voters that received only one representative while smaller numbers of whites elected multiple representatives from a greater number of smaller population districts. The Supreme Court decision Baker v. Carr put an end to this process and established the “one person, one vote” principle that requires all political districts to be roughly the same population. To comply with Baker, states redraw their legislative and state senate districts every ten years in addition to updating their congressional districts.

Powerful computer mapping software offers politicians and their cronies the ability to gerrymander districts with much greater precision than was previously possible. By using data from party registration and previous election results, district mappers can go block by block to select or omit neighborhoods and achieve districts that have an artificial tilt to achieve the results that the mappers want.

It has become commonplace for the political party that controls the redistricting process in Ohio to draw political boundaries that advantage candidates of their own party. Often, the majority party will “pack” voters of the opposing party into districts that are overwhelmingly of that party. This ensures that the minority party will win the packed district, but dilutes their strength in surrounding districts. Alternatively, a majority party will “crack” a geographic community into two or more districts.
Cracking takes a county or town that would otherwise be able to elect a candidate of the minority party and combines it with voters in strongholds of the majority party to deprive the minority party of winning any seats in that area. Other tricks involve moving a district boundary to include the address of an individual officeholder, or to ensure that two incumbents of the same party don’t wind up in the same district and have to run against each other.

Gerrymanders can disrupt three important features of fair and accurate representation:

Competition.
For democracy to work, incumbent politicians and ruling parties must be aggressively challenged by opposing candidates and parties in order to hold elected officials accountable and ensure that they continue to represent the will of the voters. This does not mean that it is inherently anti-democratic for one candidate to defeat another by a large margin. For example, the landslide elections of 1984 when Ronald Reagan soundly defeated Walter Mondale and 1964 when Johnson trounced Goldwater were not any less democratic than the more narrow presidential election of 1960 when Kennedy beat Nixon. Sometimes the electorate widely favors one candidate or party. A fair elections process will reflect that mood – not artificially create a tighter race.

But, the evidence from Ohio is that political line-drawing is artificially dampening competition by intentionally drawing districts that overrepresent one party or another. This creates a considerably more lopsided playing field than would exist naturally. When voters in one district are hand-picked to overwhelmingly come from one party, it is difficult for the opposing party to recruit strong candidates because they can readily tell that they have little chance of winning. Media coverage and voter interest decline because the results of the election have been predetermined by the map drawers so there is little reason for voters to show up on election day or follow futile campaigns in the news media.

Accurate political representation.
Another basic tenet of democratic elections is that the elected government should accurately reflect the people’s values and political beliefs. So a voting population that was 55% anti-abortion would be represented by a legislature that was 55% anti-abortion. A population that was 11% gay would have a legislature that is roughly 11% homosexual.

The evidence from Ohio suggests that the current political boundaries artificially underrepresent moderate voters, women, and Democrats.

Preserving local communities.
While geography is not the sole defining characteristic of representative politics, it remains an important one. The citizens of any given county, city, or township will have some local concerns that they share in common with each other more than with neighboring communities. Urban areas may be primarily concerned about crime and education while more rural communities would prioritize land use or family values, for example.

The evidence from Ohio suggests that geographic communities are being needlessly divided by the current political districts.

Balancing values in single-member districts.
The Ohio Constitution requires that each political district elect one single representative. Single-member districts were an important reform that improved upon at-large representation where all of a district’s voters elected multiple members by casting one simple yes or no ballot and the winners being selected by a plurality.

However, single-member districts present inherent trade-offs between the values of competition, accurate political representation, and preservation of geographic communities. For instance, people who live near each other often share similar politics. Urban centers tend to favor Democrats while rural areas tend to favor Republicans. Thus, any single member district that is drawn to preserve those geographic communities may be very uncompetitive.

The best long-term solution would be to adopt multi-member districts that are larger in size than single-member districts. These larger districts would be inherently harder to gerrymander and would tend to keep geographic communities intact. Rather than at-large voting systems, the electoral process could use other voting methods such as cumulative voting, or ranked voting, that provide results that accurately represented a political constituency’s strength in the electorate – a process known as proportional representation.

Voters may need to know considerably more about proportional representation until they are ready to adopt these systems. In the meantime, we should strive for single member districts that are drawn with the goal of carefully balancing the values of competition, accurate political representation, and geographic communities instead of with the goal of artificially creating partisan advantage or protecting certain incumbents.