In November, Ohio residents will have an opportunity to vote on Issue 1, a constitutional amendment that would finally abolish the state’s extreme partisan gerrymandering. Voters will not, however, be informed of this fact on the ballot. Instead, the Ohio Supreme Court’s Republican majority ruled Monday that the amendment will be described in egregiously misleading terms on the ballot itself, with ultra-biased language designed to turn citizens against it. Incredibly, a proposal that would end gerrymandering will be framed as a proposal to require gerrymandering, a patently false representation of its intent and effect. The court’s 4–3 decision marks yet another effort to subvert democracy in Ohio by Republicans who fear that the citizenry—when given a voice on the matter—might dare to loosen their stranglehold on power.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/09/ohio-supreme-court-voter-fraud-gop.html
I opened the article. I didn’t read it. I think I might need another break from being online. It’s a difficult time to do that, as we’re about to travel to visit family. Being in airports, catching connecting flights, taking rideshares to hotels… without being online? I know we used to do this with books and music. I might be facing a trial from hell.
I might be facing a trial from hell.
it really does annoy me how online everything is, i just want to exist in the woods away from people, not causing issues. And all i get in return is security breach after security breach leaking my personal information that nobody needs to have anyway.
Fuckwits all of them
They should put in the language that the ballot will say. Instead it’s a background fluff piece.
Should have gone with multi-member proportional districts using something like Sequential Proportional Approval Voting so that gerrymandering would be near-impossible. Five members is generally considered the minimum needed to make gerrymandering pointless to even attempt.
Should have gone with multi-member proportional districts using something like Sequential Proportional Approval Voting so that gerrymandering would be near-impossible. Five members is generally considered the minimum needed to make gerrymandering pointless to even attempt.
I don’t understand how SPAV fixes gerrymandering in this case. It seems like the re-weighting operation is meant for a pool of identical ballots. When you have district-level elections that differ between ballots, how is this meant to work?
Edit: Ooooh you meant for selecting the redistricting committee, not for running the elections. Gotcha, makes sense now.
Nope. I meant for running elections. You need multiple winners in the same election for SPAV to be different from just straight Approval (vote for one or more, most votes wins). With my suggestion of 5 members per district, the candidates all run for legislator of the district, and then 5 winners are chosen using SPAV. Any semi-proportional method will work, but SPAV is arguably the way to go for a whole pile of reasons.
Anyway, so if you’re a voter in that district, you will have 5 representatives you can go talk to. With a 2-party system, usually 2 or 3 of them will be from your party. The legislature as a whole would be made up of some number of these districts, each with 5 officials. They all participate in the legislature like normal, there’s no difference between the 1st awarded seat or the last.
The reason you do this is because the people in each district will be much much more likely to have at least 1 legislator that actually represents them and their district. The legislature as a whole will also approximate the voting population as a whole in terms of votes per party vs seats per party. It makes it functionally impossible to gerrymander because if you try cracking and packing you’ll really just be moving around who wins the last couple seats in any given district, but you’ll have a hard time actually changing the overall makeup of the legislature.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining it further. It does sound like a very nice system.
First boneless wings can have bones now this? Ohio is not ok.
Ohio is not OK. Oklahoma is OK. Ohio is OH.
That’s what I said. They aren’t ok
… Oh.
Ohio has never been ok
Ohio is skibidi.
No cap.
Bogus.
Square.
Welp, that’s gonna be a lawsuit
It already was. The Ohio SC upheld almost all of the phrasing.
“We have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing”
FFS. Ohio’s officials need to actually face legal consequences for all its gerrmandering and other fuckery.
dude have you been paying attention? a fucking rapist traitorous con man took the white house, and is about to initiate jan.6 2.0, and has yet to face a single consequence beyond some piddling fines
And he didn’t even pay the full amount.
Yeah that’s the protection I actually want
The GOP can’t win a fair competition. If they could, they wouldn’t need to do things like this.
The thing is, without gerrymandering they’d still have a majority of seats. They’re not content with that though. Why have 57% of the seats when you could have 79% and be completely inoculated from consequences or the feedback of any constituencies?
they admit to this, JD vance just did.
Remember guys, it’s the democrats that are causing the problems, they’re the ones with the violent and destructive rhetoric, not the republicans. (obviously /s on the last bit here)
Skibidi Ohio
its times like this, that my very basic knowledge of the US governmental system and it’s structure make me happy.
This is bad, but it’s inherently hard to fradulate and election across 50 states with 50 independent voting systems. The founding fathers, as cross dressing as they might have been, were certainly cooking when they wrote that shit.
Now if only we could get supreme court reform.
Take away democracy and it just leaves the other thing
Fascists who cannot win democratically will reject democracy rather than reject racism.
Fascists
who cannot win democraticallywill reject democracyrather than reject racism.
This is when governments should be overthrown. The people spoke and the government did not follow through.
In 2015 and 2018, its voters overwhelmingly approved two constitutional amendments designed to limit partisan influence over maps. The amendments required the Legislature to enact genuinely bipartisan redistricting plans; if lawmakers failed to do so, a new bipartisan board, the Ohio Redistricting Commission, had to draw fair, representative maps.
This process proved easy to game by political actors, because Republican politicians held a majority on the new commission. In 2021 and 2022, this GOP majority enacted a series of flagrant gerrymanders, which the state Supreme Court struck down. The commission flouted the court’s decisions over and over again, running out the clock to the election. It then invited a conservative federal court to impose a gerrymander that the Ohio Supreme Court had already ruled unconstitutional. As a result, the state’s Republicans won a towering and unearned supermajority in the Ohio Legislature.
I feel it is time. Or, will be soon.
Silver lining to the gerrymandering shit show 2 years ago is that i no longer live in Gym Jordan’s district, so that’s cool
You lost the ability to vote against him.
You have my pitchfork!
Possibly a rule 2/6 (opinion) issue. Not sure if you guys care on an article by article basis or just by source. Headline alone is pretty charged language.
People who would be fooled by this don’t read. Just make a political ad campaign telling them which way to vote and why.
