Projection must be one of the dirtiest deeds we find in politics these days, and it can be confoundingly effective.
In this election season, some Ohio politicians are using it to persuade voters to harm themselves, just as those same leaders did last year. It didn’t work then, and you just might want to mount up again to ensure it does not work now.
I’m talking about when a politician identifies one of their own sins and accuses their opponent of it. Say, for example, you’re a lawmaker who has spent a career in the Legislature without voting once to improve the lives of children. Projection would be to accuse your opponent of being the enemy of children.
In Ohio this year, the projection is about gerrymandering. People who are desperate to hold on to unmerited power want desperately to stop voters from approving a fix to the state’s notorious gerrymandering problem.
So, they have taken to calling the fix itself gerrymandering.
Don’t fall for it. It’s a lie they are telling repeatedly to fool you. That’s exactly what they did last year when they tried to persuade you to change the state constitution to greatly reduce your power to change the state constitution. They knew the only power voters have over a runaway, gerrymandered Legislature such as exists today is through constitutional amendments, like the one last November to enshrine abortion as a right.
So, in a special election last August, they proposed an amendment to make it nearly impossible to amend the constitution. And then they told voters it was in their best interest to give up their power. Idiotic, right? Who in their right mind gives up their power over their government? Voters saw through the ploy and voted down August’s Issue 1 in a landslide.
You, the readers of this column, had a big hand in that. Long before many people in Ohio were talking about that ploy , I wrote about the insidious nature of it and beseeched you to rise up against it. I heard from many of you who did. People in Ohio talked to their neighbors, families and friends. Many Ohio ex-pats who read this column told me they got in touch with everyone they know in the state to spread the word. By the time the election came around, Ohio voters were fully informed. Truth defeated the lies.
Your fellow Ohioans need you to rise up again, to end gerrymandering, which is a nice word for cheating. The people in power keep using that power to draw disproportionate legislative maps, leaving us with a government that does not represent us.
The quick history here is that back in 2015 or so, citizens got together to end the partisan gerrymandering that was wrecking Ohio government. With maps drawn to strongly favor a single party, incumbents increasingly faced challenges from candidates on the fringes, leaving us with extremist leaders who don’t come close to the centrism for which Ohio is known.
As citizens got close to putting a fair mapmaking system before the voters, however, Ohio legislators headed them off with their own proposals. They offered up a seven-member redistricting commission formed of elected leaders, with rules to rein in the nonsense.
Voters, believing lawmakers acted in good faith, voted by more than a 70 percent margin for the new process, for the Statehouse and U.S. Congress.
After the 2020 Census, however, we learned the reform was a failure. Over and over, those seven elected leaders put forth gerrymandered maps. The Ohio Supreme Court repeatedly rejected them for violating the constitution and the will of the voters. The Republican chief justice at the time, Maureen O’Connor, wrote an opinion suggesting that voters start over, creating a system that boots elected leaders from mapmaking entirely.
When O’Connor retired, she led a group to come up with a new system, partly based on one that has worked beautifully in Michigan. It involves having a group of everyday Ohioans – not politicians or elected leaders – do the mapmaking. It’s a terrific way to get the job done, and if you read to the bottom of this column, you’ll see how fair it is, despite the naysayers.
More than 700,000 Ohioans signed petitions to put the O’Connor plan on the ballot. And our elected pariahs instantly began trying to convince us that it’s bad for us.
Frank LaRose, the face of last year’s reviled August Issue 1, has used his role as secretary of state to write ballot language that is the opposite of what O’Connor’s proposal would do. It goes so far as to call her fix gerrymandering itself. That’s the projection I mentioned above. LaRose’s sin is that he wants to protect gerrymandering, and to do that, he now accuses the reformers of gerrymandering.
Does he think Ohio voters are that stupid?
For reasons I can’t fathom, Gov. Mike DeWine has come out against O’Connor’s proposal. He now favors a system in which citizens propose maps but lawmakers have the final say. Please, though, remember back two years. When DeWine was seeking your vote for re-election in 2022, he specifically said we should remove lawmakers from the process. He said they have a conflict of interest in drawing maps that affect their own political fortunes. His turnabout now is hypocrisy.
I expect the lies will intensify, become more farcical and get repeated ad nauseum. The gerrymanderers know that the more they repeat a lie, the more likely you are to believe it. People who believe in good government have to stand up for the truth. And you can do that by doing what you did last year, talking to ten of your Ohio friends to make them aware of what is at stake.
As for the attacks on O’Connor’s system as crooked, read on. It could not be more fair.
Creating O’Connor’s mapmaking commission begins with the Ohio Ballot Board, excluding the secretary of state. That leaves two Republican and two Democratic lawmakers, who were placed on the Ballot Board by legislators we elected.
Their only job is to find four retired judges – two Republicans and two Democrats – to create the mapmaking commission.
To find those retired judges, Republican Ballot Board members screen Republican applications to identify 15 nominees, and the same goes for the Democrats. Then comes the switcheroo, when the Republican Ballot Board members pick two of the Democratic nominees, and Democratic Ballot Board members choose two Republican nominees.
The Ballot Board then goes away and the four retired judges take over, using a professional search firm to find applicants for the redistricting commission from a geographic and demographic cross-section of Ohioans.
It’s all done in public, not behind closed doors as happens now. The judges will publish the names, party affiliations and hometowns of the applicants, with a public portal for anyone to comment.
Ultimately, the judges will name 15 Republican, 15 Democratic and 15 independent finalists. In a public meeting, the judges will randomly draw names of two Republicans, two Democrats and two independents to be the first six commissioners. Those six will review the other finalists and name nine more commissioners, three from each party and three independents.
The commissioners’ only job is to draw legislative districts likely to create a partisan breakdown of seats that matches votes in statewide elections over six years. Once done, the commissioners go back to their private lives. The 15 cannot hold elected or appointed office in Ohio for the next six years.
Important note: Prohibited from the commission is anyone who held elected and appointed office at any level of government in the previous seven years, or their immediate family. Also prohibited are lobbyists and anyone who worked for, consulted for or contracted with a political party, political action committee or campaign in the previous seven years. This is about civic-minded Ohioans doing a brief public service and then going home. The self-serving politicians are locked out.
If you’re a public-minded citizen who believe in all this, then help make it happen by talking to everyone you know. And after voters approve the new system in November, maybe consider applying to be on the commission.
We need honest people to rise up in this state. It’s time to reject the liars, again.