Gerrymandering/Redistricting

This year's process and these maps were approved against our will. In more than 10 hours of testimony on congressional plans, not a single Texan spoke in favor of the draft maps. Without reform, we're bound to repeat this flawed process in another 10 years. It's time to put an end to a process that allows the politicians to choose which Texans they want to represent.

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.

"We are troubled that these districts would especially hurt Black voters, harmfully split communities and undermine the freedom of North Carolinians to have a voice in choosing their representatives," said Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina.

Susan Lerner, the executive director of the civic watchdog group Common Cause New York and a proponent of all three initiatives, argued that the success of Republican and Conservative attacks highlighted the fragility of democracy itself. “There was a strong anti-democratic push and the pro-democracy folks stayed home,” she said. Finally, as written, the ballot questions, which required voters to flip their ballots over to weigh in, were hard to understand, according to Common Cause and like-minded groups. “The ballot language for 1, 3, and 4 was frankly impenetrable,” Ms. Lerner said of the three measures that went down to defeat.

Jennifer Parenti, Northern Colorado organizer for Colorado Common Cause, said, “Communities of color make up about 30% of the state’s population overall. But unfortunately, this proposed congressional map does not reflect that diversity. It, rather, splits our communities of color across multiple districts, while seemingly prioritizing municipal boundaries and protecting incumbents.”