The Guardian: They had a plan to unrig US elections. Things are not going as expected

The Guardian: They had a plan to unrig US elections. Things are not going as expected

Nextdoor in Ohio, reformers are closely monitoring what happens in Michigan. Catherine Turcer, the executive director of the Ohio chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, has been working for decades to get Ohio to adopt a new process for redistricting. Just as they did in Michigan, Republican lawmakers carved up the state in 2011 to give themselves a majority in the state legislature and a 12-4 advantage in the state’s delegation. Over the last few decades, Ohioans repeatedly voted down redistricting reform proposals, including a 2012 effort to create an independent redistricting commission. But in 2015, Turcer and other reformers in the state achieved a breakthrough. Voters approved a constitutional amendment that gave redistricting power for state legislative districts to a seven-person panel of elected officials from both parties. It required the panel to make its decisions in public and set out several criteria the panel must follow, including one that says districts can’t “unduly favor or disfavor a party or incumbents”. “I look back and I felt like pigs were flying around the statehouse,” Turcer said. But this is the first year that the new rules have been in effect and Turcer watched with horror last month as Republicans ignored the new guardrails and drew severely gerrymandered maps anyway. Overriding Democratic objections, the panel adopted a plan that would give Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature. Even though Republicans have consistently received around 54% of the statewide vote over the last decade, Republicans said they should be entitled to as many as 81% of the seats in the state legislature. Their rationale for that was sketchy – they said they were entitled to such a high vote share because they won 81% of the 16 previous statewide elections.

Greta Harris had enough.

The 16-person panel she was co-chairing was on the verge of a meltdown after months of trying to draw new boundaries for districts in the Virginia state legislature. The deadline for submitting maps had arrived but there was no plan.

The panel was tasked with redrawing political districts, a task that lawmakers across the US undertake every 10 years. In recent years, there’s been a growing alarm at how politicians have taken advantage of that process, distorting district lines to essentially choose the voters they represent and locking in their re-election and party control of certain seats. There’s now a broader recognition of how the practice, called gerrymandering, can essentially rig elections in favor of one party. …

Virginia is part of an unprecedented wave of states that are trying new processes this year for drawing district boundaries. Those experiments mark significant wins in decade-long efforts by government watchdogs, civil rights organizations and ordinary citizens to limit the severe manipulation of district lines for partisan gain, a practice called gerrymandering. …

Nextdoor in Ohio, reformers are closely monitoring what happens in Michigan. Catherine Turcer, the executive director of the Ohio chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, has been working for decades to get Ohio to adopt a new process for redistricting. Just as they did in Michigan, Republican lawmakers carved up the state in 2011 to give themselves a majority in the state legislature and a 12-4 advantage in the state’s delegation.

“I look back and I felt like pigs were flying around the statehouse,” Turcer said.

But this is the first year that the new rules have been in effect and Turcer watched with horror last month as Republicans ignored the new guardrails and drew severely gerrymandered maps anyway. Overriding Democratic objections, the panel adopted a plan that would give Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature. Even though Republicans have consistently received around 54% of the statewide vote over the last decade, Republicans said they should be entitled to as many as 81% of the seats in the state legislature. Their rationale for that was sketchy – they said they were entitled to such a high vote share because they won 81% of the 16 previous statewide elections.