Ohio Issue 4 Would Make a Bad Situation Intolerable

First things first: As I have mentioned before, Ohio’s currently gerrymandered congressional districts are an inappropriate application of party political engineering by the Republican majority:

So my immediate reaction to Issue 4, which is a proposal to “fix” how congressional and state office district lines are drawn in Ohio, was “sounds promising–let’s see the details.”

Unfortunately, the details stink (excerpted from the ballot language, bolded words are mine):

* (the amendment would) Provide that a primary criterion to be utilized by the new commission in creating legislative districts would be to ensure that the districts are competitive, according to a mathematical formula contained in the Amendment.
* (the amendment would) Provide that the commission must adopt a qualifying plan with the highest “competitiveness number,” as defined in the proposed Amendment.

Note the words “primary” and “must.” Because of those two words, the amendment will force the people in charge of drawing the districts (that’s a mess, too, but I’ll ignore that, except to say that it’s yet another reason to vote “no” on 4) to create odd-shaped districts that are even worse than the current ones. Here’s an example based on an attempt to draw congressional districts based on “competitiveness” in accordance with the totality of Issue 4’s ballot language (HT Project Logic):

(map removed in the interest of saving space)
Here’s another, (HT Redstate.com, added Nov. 11 for future historical reference):

Anyone who thought that the people who drafted Issue 4 couldn’t come up with something worse than the gerrymandered disgrace we already have vastly underestimated their talents. The 8th District in the first map would lump people from the Cincinnati suburbs in Southwestern Ohio with residents near the northwest end of the state. The 2nd District in teh first map stretches out similarly, and in places looks to be only a mile or two wide. I’m not even sure a congressman could be sure of who he or she is representing with this patchwork-quilted mess. In the second map, it’s hard to see how a district can include parts of Columbus and Youngstown (12th), or stretch from Chillicothe to Steubenville (17th).

And please, don’t tell me that this is a misrepresentation of what will happen if Issue 4 passes–it’s the logical result of trying to make every district “competitive” in a roughly 50-50 state where Democrats dominate in the north, the northeast, and a few urban areas, and Republicans dominate nearly everywhere else.

There is also an implication built into Issue 4 that I find especially annoying, namely that it assumes that the current two-party system will last into eternity, and with the current two parties. Issue 4 presupposes ideas of “competitiveness” and “balance” between the two existing parties, when the idea of drawing district lines should essentially be to the extent possible about drawing a bunch of rectangles or triangles (e.g., for Congress, smaller draw smaller rectangles or triangles around urban areas and larger ones around rural areas, while trying to avoid splitting counties between multiple districts). I’m not going to concede that the two parties are going to remain in existence forever, or even that a two-party system will be the best answer forever, and I am certainly not going to vote for anything that as a side effect serves to assist in its perpetuation.

Issue 4’s proponents have accomplished the nearly impossible task of creating a cure that is worse than the disease. Issue 4 should be rejected, emphatically.

Whatever Iowa is doing to ensure sensible district lines, we should strongly consider: