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Despite a setback in the courts that may push the vote in California on redistricting reform back to next year, a similar move in Ohio is adding steam to the movement.
Jill Stewart has a great article on what redistricting is all about (via Bear to the Right):
Most voters think that when they vote, they do so within a community of interest, based largely on geography, known as a voting district. How quaint. That was true once. But now, the California legislature uses computer programs to painstakingly divide voters, block by block. They no longer divide us based on communities of interest, but based on party registration.
Republicans and Democrats are carefully separated from one another and stuck in bizarrely shaped voting districts controlled by just one party. During the spring primary, the party that controls the rigged district carefully spoon-feeds its corralled voters a pre-selected candidate awash in campaign funds. Usually this well-funded party hack beats any normal person who hoped to represent that party come November.
Then, in the November election, because the fake and often strangely shaped voting district is stacked, the party hack who won the spring primary can’t lose. Voters are spoon-fed a hack, and with rare exception, it’s mathematically impossible for the hack to lose.
Think of The Matrix. You are being spoon-fed in order to support a creepy apparatus that wants to control your world. You don’t even know it.
The result? Safe seats, that never change from one party to another:
Safe seats stole away our democracy in California while we slept. Safe seats, are why none of California’s 53 Congressional seats changed party hands last Nov. 2, and why none of 100 legislative seats changed party hands. Safe seats are why these freeze-frame outcomes were predicted months before the actual elections.
Party-controlled redistricting benefits Democrats in California, and Republicans in Ohio. In both states, it's got to go.
Critics of the Republican grip on Ohio politics filed petitions on Tuesday that seek a statewide vote on three constitutional amendments that would overturn the way elections are run and strip elected officials of their power to draw legislative districts.
The move, by the group Reform Ohio Now, is an effort to tap into sentiment across the country to remove political influence from the mechanics of elections. The movement has been sparked in part by partisan lines that are sharply reducing electoral competition in Congress and by efforts by political outsiders like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California to upend the established order.
The Ohio group is backed by so-called good-government organizations like Common Cause, though Republicans insist it is little more than a front for disgruntled Democrats frozen out of power.
If its petitions are successful, a vote on the proposed amendments would be held in November in a campaign that Republicans and Democrats predicted would draw intense interest and millions of dollars from outside the state.
"People are fed up," Scarlett Bouder, a leader of Reform Ohio Now, said in a telephone news conference from Columbus, where the petitions were filed. "They want change."
See this post for more.
#1
#2Good question, Matt. I think the plan is to get an alternative method passed by the legislature, that is less subject to control by either political party. From the NY Times article on Ohio:
In both states, redistricting would be handed to an independent panel appointed by Republicans and Democrats...
Can you quote the relevant passage from the Constitution here so we can have a look at it?
What about the provision in the US Constitution that says that the legislature is to determine how and where congressmen are elected? How can these moves pass muster?