Say Goodbye to Gerry

I have a simple plan to solve gerrymandering, and it has the added advantage of letting the parties more clearly demonstrate their values.

For illustrative purposes, we’ll use Ohio.

Ohio has 15 House seats. Trump took 55% of the vote to ~44% for Harris. By most measures, fair Congressional maps would have awarded 6 or 7 House seats to Democrats, and 8 or 9 to the GOP. Instead, seats went 10-5 in favor of the GOP.

The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that our maps are unconstitutional. They are supposed to be drawn in a non-partisan manner, but partisans still weigh heavily in the process.

I propose something, in my mind, far superior.

Each party presents a list of potential candidates, matching the number of available seats [15 in the case of Ohio]. They campaign throughout the state as they see fit. Everyone at the polls votes for a party in the House. After the votes are totaled, we apportion the seats in accordance with the votes. If there’s an exact tie, we can either have a runoff or a coin flip for the last seat.

Once each side knows the number of Representatives they will have, they then draw a map that shows how THEY will represent the state.

This would mean that, state-wide, you would always have a Representative you voted for, regardless of who your neighbors voted for.

This would create direct proportional representation, would provide better representation to everyone across the state, and allow the parties to better define themselves based on where they put effort and people. It is even more simple with regard to the balloting process than our current system.

No commissions, no re-districting for the federal government, no trying to find “independents” to draw maps. Every vote counts in every area of the state- the GOP scraping up an extra thousand votes in Summit County could have real meaning, as would Democrats putting effort into converting farmers based on policy proposals that keep family farms from being foreclosed.

We would also never again have to hear propaganda from conservatives when they’re subjected to the same medicine they try to dish out at every opportunity.

#politics