Politico: States Aren’t Waiting for the Supreme Court to Solve Gerrymandering

For Americans who want to fight the mapmaker’s tyranny over politics, the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered the classic losers’ consolation: Wait ’til next year. Or the next. Or forever. …

“It’s very clear the courts are taking their time to determine that gerrymandering is unconstitutional,” says Catherine Turcer, executive director for Common Cause Ohio, which backed the new law. “We have a very good understanding of the manipulation of district lines. There are very real consequences to rigging elections.”

The anti-gerrymandering movement is growing. “In Ohio and other states, we’ve looked at ways to move the state Legislature to action,” says Turcer. “When we couldn’t, we started collecting signatures for a citizens’ initiative.” …

In 2005 and 2012, with Republicans in control, it was the Democrats’ turn to offer similar proposals. Voters rejected them even more strenuously. Turcer, who backed those two proposals, says “almost any problem you frame not as addressing an unfairness but a partisan grab,” tends to lose at the polls. Opponents portrayed reformers as “people not in power who are just whiners,” she says, “or grabbing power, or just greedy.” …

Ohio has voted for the winner of every presidential election since 1964. It leans slightly Republican, but Democrats have a shot: Trump beat Clinton there by 8 points, while Obama beat Romney by 2 points in 2012 and McCain by 4 in 2008. Yet the 2011 Republican mapmakers, working in secret in a Columbus hotel suite, divided the state into 12 Republican-leaning congressional districts and four Democratic-leaning districts. The previous map had been gerrymandered less ruthlessly, creating five swing districts that changed hands between 2006 and 2010. Not so with the new map, which has performed as designed, producing 12-4 Republican congressional delegations in 2012, 2014 and 2016. Republicans won 62 percent of the state’s congressional elections from 2002 to 2010; they’ve won 75 percent of them since. “You get at a point where the mapmakers have more to say about who gets elected than the voters,” says Turcer. …

But congressional redistricting was left out of the deal. Democrats blamed Ohio’s own John Boehner, then speaker of the U.S. House, for keeping the reform from applying to the all-important congressional elections. So liberal and good-government groups launched a petition drive in 2017 that proposed a constitutional amendment to apply the reform to the congressional map. “Once we got to about 100,000 validated signatures,” says Turcer, “the state Legislature started having conversations.” …

“Our [plan] is very pragmatic, which will not be appealing to some folks,” says Turcer. “But Ohioans are a pragmatic people, and we’ve been at this for a very, very long time.” …

Neither side thinks Ohio’s 2021 mapmaking will be easy. Turcer says her coalition plans to recruit “an army of citizen mapmakers” to hold the Legislature and redistricting commission accountable. “It’ll be ugly,” says Huffman, “a lot of the usual back and forthing and press conferences.” But he thinks both sides will eventually agree on a 10-year map that’ll be fairer than today’s lines.