Legislators to redistrict Ohio

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Sam Kay, THE MIAMI STUDENT, 11/24/09.  COLUMBUS — Ohio lawmakers want to change the way boundaries are drawn for Ohio’s 99 House districts, 33 Senate districts and 18 congressional districts, but so far have not agreed how to do so.

Under the current system, there is a “State Apportionment Board” composed of the governor, secretary of state and state auditor, in addition to one representative each from the majority and minority parties in the Ohio General Assembly. This board convenes decennially after the U.S. Census figures are released and is controlled by whichever party holds two of the three executive offices.

Congressional districts are drawn and voted on by the general assembly. Under current law, redistricting for the general assembly can only take place once every 10 years, but there is no restriction on how often congressional districts can be redrawn.

Democrats and Republicans agree the current system is highly partisan and in need of reform, with legislators from both parties introducing numerous proposals for revamping the redistricting process during the past decade. The last redistricting took place in 2000 by a Republican-controlled apportionment board.

“The Republicans certainly drew the districts in 2000 to favor themselves,” said Seth Bringman, communication director for the Ohio Democratic Party (ODP). “It took almost a decade to take back the Ohio House under lines that were drawn by the other party, the first time in Ohio’s history that a party had regained control of one of the chambers after the lines were drawn by the other party.”

State Sen Jon Husted (R-Kettering) introduced a measure earlier this year that would reform the redistricting process.

“The current approach allows … the board to draw the districts in a hyper-partisan way that basically guarantees that party’s control for the next 10 years,” Husted said. “(The board) has gerrymandered districts in a way that allows the representatives to choose their voters instead of the voters choosing their representatives.”

The measure, Senate Joint Resolution-5 (SJR-5), was passed by the Republican-controlled Senate in September by a partisan 21-12 vote. It now sits in the Elections and Ethics Committee of the Democratic-controlled House, which has not yet held a hearing.

SJR-5 would give redistricting power to a new seven-member “redistricting commission.”

In addition to the three elected executive offices currently on the apportionment board, the commission would include the majority and minority leadership from the House and Senate, and would require a five vote “supermajority” ­- including the support of the minority – to redraw district lines.

SJR-5 would also give the responsibility for redrawing congressional districts to the redistricting commission and would extend the ban on redrawing general assembly districts more than once a decade to congressional districts.

Keary McCarthy, spokesman for House Speaker Armond Budish (D-Beachwood), said Budish has reservations about SJR-5.

“The speaker had some reservations about how SJR-5 came out of the Senate, which was along straight party lines,” McCarthy said. “Anytime you’re going to change something, you need to start the process by generating bipartisan support. Secondly, SJR-5 does a lot to change the process for who draws the district lines, but it doesn’t speak as much to how those lines are drawn.”

McCarthy said Budish would like to see the use of more specific criteria in the redistricting process.

State Rep. Dan Stewart (D-Columbus), chairman of the Elections and Ethics Committee, agreed that more specific criteria are needed in legislation to reform the redistricting process.

“For me, it doesn’t matter if you just shuffle the deck of who is on a board or panel that decides the districts if you don’t reign in or give better rules and limitations to those doing it,” Stewart said. “I think there is a better way to do this process. Perhaps we can find a compromise.”

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s office believes it has identified potential ways to improve the process. Brunner’s office held a district-drawing competition earlier this year to demonstrate the feasibility of a quantifiable method of redistricting.

“There can be a process that is quantifiable, competitive and measurable,” said Jeff Ortega, spokesman for Brunner.

The competition to redraw Ohio’s congressional districts used four criteria for judgment: compactness, communities of interest, competitiveness and representational fairness.

According to the secretary of state’s office, plans generated by the competition showed significant improvement over the current system.

While the current plan has a partisan split of 13 districts leaning Republican and five leaning Democratic, only seven total were rated as being competitive and 44 county fragments. The three winning maps were able to achieve even partisan splits with as many as 12 of 18 districts being rated as competitive and as few as seven county fragments.

Ohio Citizen Action (OCA), a “good government” organization that has been highly critical of the current redistricting system, helped sponsor the redistricting competition.

Catherine Turcer, director of OCA’s legislative project, said OCA has been working for a long time for redistricting reform.

“We’re concerned about political manipulation of the lines,” Turcer said.

Although OCA is mostly supportive of Husted’s redistricting legislation, Turcer said OCA would like to see a stronger definition of “district competitiveness” included in the measure.

Although Democrats have controlled two of the three competitive positions on the apportionment board since 2006, all three positions will be up for re-election in 2010, before the next round of redistricting is to take place.

Husted is a candidate for secretary of state, a position being vacated by Democrat Jennifer Brunner as she seeks the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. Husted’s main opponent for the position is State Rep. Jennifer Garrison (D-Marietta).

Gov. Ted Strickland (D) and State Auditor Mary Taylor (R) are both expected to seek re-election.

Bringman said SJR-5 should be considered in the context of Husted’s candidacy.

“As far as (SJR-5) is concerned, he was in the state legislature for a while, and now that he’s running for secretary of state, he has all these ideas all of a sudden,” Bringman said.

Husted said he introduced or supported similar measures in 2006, 2007 and 2008 when he was Speaker of the Ohio House. Husted has been a state legislator since 2000.

According to McCarthy, Husted actively worked to defeat a 2005 ballot measure that would have amended the Ohio constitution to reform redistricting in a way “similar to what the secretary of state did in (the) competition.”

“I know he was a pretty vocal opponent of it,” McCarthy said.