Ohio Republicans' Plan To Ratf*ck Gerrymander Reform Works Perfectly
Turns out all you have to do is lie!
Ohio has one of the most outrageously gerrymandered electoral maps in the country, although with so many red states in the competition it can be hard to keep up. What’s really impressive is that the gerrymandered Republican majority in the state Lege managed — twice! — to thwart the will of voters who passed ballot initiatives to demand fair electoral maps.
But pro-democracy activists are a tenacious lot, and this year, they managed to come back with a new plan that would amend the Ohio state constitution and take elected officials and lobbyists entirely out of the process of drawing electoral maps. The plan got enough petition signatures to make the ballot, and it was starting to look like voters would really be able to bring back some democracy and fairness through the measure, named “Issue 1.”
And then of course, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) and fellow Republicans blowed it up all to fuck by writing an incredibly misleading description of the amendment for the ballot, telling voters that Issue 1 would require partisan gerrymandering, which of course it did not. Ohio’s right-leaning state supreme court then approved the ballot language, despite a state law requiring that ballot measures be described accurately and without bias.
Big surprise: Despite the best efforts of supporters to educate voters about what Issue 1 would really do, the initiative was overwhelmingly rejected by voters Tuesday, failing by 46 percent to 54 percent — as the Columbus Dispatch notes, by roughly the same margin as the state voted for goddamn Donald Trump.
Just to keep the gaslighting going, the leader of the anti-Measure 1 campaign, former Ohio GOP chair Bob Paduchik, called Tuesday’s vote a victory for “the truth,” which is now defined only by Republicans. “Despite Democrats’ best efforts to deceive Ohioans into changing our constitution and rigging elections in their favor, the truth has carried the day,” he oozed.
Again, he’s talking about an amendment that would have ended Republican gerrymandering and required fair, competitive districts.
Noting the Bizarro World phrasing of the ballot description, retired state supreme court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, the primary author of the amendment, said the GOP-framed ballot description did a great job of baffling voters who thought they were voting for fairer elections:
“In analyzing the vote tonight, it is clear that millions of Ohioans who voted ‘yes’ want to end gerrymandering,” said O'Connor, a former Republican officeholder. “And it is also clear that those who voted ‘no’ thought that they were voting to end gerrymandering.”
Senate President Matt Huffman (R) was delighted with the bang-up job of obfuscation his Republican colleagues pulled off, exulting, “We were dead in the water in July. […] Gov. Mike DeWine turned this thing around. He put a stake in the sand and said this is not going to happen in the state of Ohio.”
Wasn’t that awesome? This time out, all the Republicans had to do to thwart the voters’ intention was to make a real reform bill sound terrible! They didn’t even have to sidestep the earlier laws requiring fair districts.
The ballot language flat out twisted the facts, saying that passing Issue 1 would create a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.”
Fun fact: As part of creating the new independent redistricting commission, the bill does indeed repeal the previous two constitutional amendments that the Republicans circumvented altogether. They are the entirety of the “constitutional protections” Issue 1 would’ve repealed, because in practice they hadn’t actually protected against gerrymandering at all.
But gosh, that sounded so bad that many Ohio voters who were eager to get rid of the GOP gerrymander were taken in by the ballot language, as designed.
Bolts recounts the experience of Songgu Kwon, an Ohio voter who fell for the trap:
Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration.
But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo.
Hell, the day before the election, Fox News Dot Com simply quoted the ballot description of Issue 1 verbatim and asserted that the initiative would institute gerrymandering and repeal “protections” against it.
In addition to enlisting voters to ratfuck the gerrymander reform, Ohio Republicans also won three out of three elections for the state supreme court Tuesday, filling one vacant seat and ousting two Democrats, so future efforts to prevent state elections from being tainted by democracy are likely. Perhaps all Democratic candidates for office in Ohio will be denoted on the ballot by prefacing their names with the words “pedophile supporter and communist.”
[Columbus Dispatch / Mother Jones]
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I am still moving to Cleveland next year.
No byline? Is our Dok getting hosed by SubStack again?