- [Announcer] Production and distribution of "City Club Forums," an Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to "The City Club of Cleveland."

I'm Dan Moulthrop, CEO here at the City Club and a proud member.

Today's June 15th, you're with a virtual City Club Forum.

In May, the US Census Bureau announced population statistics following the completion of the 2020 census.

As it has every decade for the last 50 years, Ohio will lose yet one more seat in Congress, decreasing the number of representatives this time around from 16 to 15.

While Ohio actually gained population since the 2010 census, other areas of the country especially the Sunbelt and the West grew much faster.

The timing of this is significant.

Three years ago, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved Issue 1, that's a plan to more fairly redraw the state's congressional districts which are considered among the most gerrymandered in the nation.

The new system of drawing congressional maps is supposed to begin this year.

So what exactly is supposed to happen now?

And how are legislators preparing for these changes?

What are the implications for Northeast Ohio and Cuyahoga County?

And further, how do we ensure that the redistricting reforms that were passed are actually implemented fairly?

Also, how does Ohio's experience with gerrymandering and attempt to reform fit into the broader picture that we see across the nation?

Leading our conversation today is Karen Kasler.

She is the Bureau Chief at Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau.

And Karen will introduce our panel, Karen.

- Thanks, Dan.

You'll see behind me before I introduce the panel that the map that is featured as the no more snake on the lake graphic on the City Club Forum's website, that's a map that was given to me by former state representative, Mike Curtin, a Democrat who was a fierce advocate for changing the system of redistricting.

And so we'll keep that up to remind people of what we're talking about - Karen, muted.

- Gosh, you think I'd done this enough.

You think I wasn't a broadcast professional?

(laughing) So I was just explaining that this map right back here is a map that was given to me by state representative Mike Curtin, a Democrat of Columbus who retired a couple of years ago who was a fierce advocate for redistricting reform when he was here.

And this was the map, the map that is on the graphic on the City Club of Cleveland's forum site that you see today.

And so I just wanted to keep that up throughout this conversation so we know what we're talking about here.

So let me introduce the panelists and who will all be un-muted I'm by the time they start talking.

First of all, Dave Daley, he is senior fellow at FairVote and author of "Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back "to Save Democracy."

We have Jen Miller, Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, and Alora Thomas-Lundborg, Senior Staff Attorney with the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

So I'll invite you all to unmute here while I go over a couple of instructions for people who are listening.

As in every City Club Forum, you can participate with your questions.

Text them to 330-541-5794.

It's right there on the screen, 330-541-5794.

You can also tweet them @TheCityClub.

So @TheCityClub and we'll try to work them in, but that's a tradition here that we always bring in audience questions.

So I wanna start before we go to that with some basics of the big changes here.

This is the first time that the maps for both Congress and also the State House and Senate will be redrawn using a new process, one that was approved in 2015, one that was approved in 2018 by voters.

But it's complicated, both of them are complicated.

So I wanna start with maybe Alora here.

If you can give kind of a thumbnail sketch of what are the key elements of these differences and the changes, what do these two plans do, and what are the key dates here that we need to keep in mind?

- Sure, and happy to give a stab at that.

And then I'm sure that Jen and David will come in and tell me where I got it wrong.

So as we've said, there are two processes and I'll start with the General Assembly process, the process for drawing the General Assembly map first.

That process is the first process, which is why we should start with it.

It's also, it's both, it was also the one that was passed first.

So the General Assembly process was passed in 2015, but this will be the first time it will be used.

And it sets up a commission process for drawing Ohio's maps.

There are seven commission members, the governor, the auditor, the secretary of state, and then four members that are considered political, coming out of the General Assembly itself.

Each party in each House gets to select a representative to go into the commission.

The commission is supposed to debut its first plan by September 1st, which means right now we're gonna be in a very tight timeline because the first set of census data is not coming out until August 16th.

Before the commission can adopt a plan by September 1st, it's supposed to have three hearings.

And in order to adopt a plan and what is considered the first round, the commission would have to have two members from each party vote for a map.

If two members from each party votes for a map, then they can have a 10-year map.

If by September 1st they can't reach that kind of consensus on the commission, then there was a 15 day period in which there is a hearing and the commission tries to reach that kind of consensus.

If they can't reach the consensus that would have in this instance to Dems on board, then they can pass a map by majority support, a four-year map.

So that's the General Assembly process.

So our first date we're thinking about is September 1st.

And the second date is September 15th.

And in theory, by September 15th, the whole process should be wrapped up.

And then we move on to the process for Congress.

That process is slightly different but not less complicated.

For that process, you start first in the General Assembly itself.

By September 30th, the General Assembly is supposed to pass a map with three fifths of the General Assembly, including half of the opposition party.

So in this case, half of the Democrats would have to vote for a map.

If they can do that, then you get a ten-year map.

If they can't do that, then it goes to the commission to see if they can reach the kind of quorum where they would get the two Dems on board.

And they would have until October 30th to do that.

If they can't do that, then it goes back to the General Assembly.

The General Assembly would first try to pass a map with again three-fifths of the vote, but this time only a third of the Democrats would have to vote for a map.

In that case, they would get a ten-year map.

If that process does not work, then the General Assembly could pass a map with majority support, a four-year map by November 30th.

So it's quite a complicated process.

Within each amendment, there are limitations on the kind of county splits and splits of jurisdictions you can have.

There are requirements about keeping districts contiguous, meaning you can't have another district cut into a district and then break kind of a contiguous line.

You have to keep the districts compact, which means they generally can't be these kinds of large brawling districts.

And if folks are interested in that, I can talk a little bit more about compactness.

And then there are limitations on that maps can't be too partisan, but we'll be figuring out what that means this time around.

And each amendment has some language about limitations on partisanship in the maps.

- Yeah, there's a lot there and a lot to get done in a fairly short period of time.

But I think for most people, and when you look at that map and you think about the snake on the lake and the weird dock, that's the district that Jim Jordan is in and some of these other districts, I think for a lot of people, the real question is going from 16 members of Congress down to 15 and what's gonna happen with that.

So are we gonna, still we have 12 Republicans and four Democrats in Ohio's Congressional delegation now.

Who loses, who loses a seat, where do you draw that?

And so I wanna throw this out to Jen and David to jump in.

Are we gonna go to a 12-3 map?

Are we gonna go to an 11-4 map?

Are we gonna even further down the road to more partisanship here with these new maps?

Go ahead Jen and David.

- Well, I'll start.

I mean, I certainly hope that we don't see a 12-3 map.

And the reason is because that's not proportional to the vote share for Ohio.

So in general, I think we all know that Ohio lean slightly more Republican, maybe 54%.

But for the last decade it has had 75% of those congressional seats.

That's because of gerrymandering.

Those mapmakers set out to cement in a firm partisan majority and it performed perfectly.

It didn't matter whether it was a year that Obama won Ohio or Trump won Ohio, we saw this 12-4 map, we didn't see any change.

My hope would be that the new congressional map is closer to a 50/50 split, slightly more Republican than Democrat would not be surprising.

And my also hope is that as voter preferences and actions change across the decade, that we see some seats changing hands.

And then we know that we have a far more fair and responsive map than we've had.

- I think that's right.

First, thank you for having me.

It's really a pleasure to be here with Jen, that the League and Common Cause and groups in Ohio that have worked so hard on this issue for so long have really made change on behalf of voters.

And the work Alora has done on litigating partisan gerrymanders is just magnificent.

So the hope here would certainly be that Ohio gets a fair and responsive map for this next decade.

As Jen was talking about, over the course of the last decade, you had a map that did not budge.

It produced the exact same 12-4 partisan breakdown for five straight elections.

And as we know, Ohio is not a 75-25 state, maybe it's a 54-46 state, right?

And you have had similar issues in the state legislature.

Where gerrymandering really becomes such a problem is when you eliminate competitive districts, you make it so that the only election that matters is in the party primary, you force politics to the extremes at all ends.

And then policy-making really becomes separated from the public will the same time that lawmakers are really insulated from the ballot box.

And that is a recipe for a real crisis in a representative democracy.

What are you likely to see in Ohio?

I think Jen is right on this.

There is certainly the chance that Republicans could look to draw a 12-3 map.

They could try and draw Democratic districts around Columbus, Cincinnati, and Cleveland, and try and manipulate the rest of the state to a 12 other solid or relatively safe Republican seats.

I think a fair map probably looks something more like a 9-6 map.

I don't think you're gonna get anywhere close to that in reality.

What we have seen around the country over the course of the last decade and what we hear from politicians as this redistricting cycle heats up again is that they are going to go for essentially whatever they think they can get away with on both sides.

Democrats in Illinois and New York are talking this way as are Republicans who control the process in many of the same states that they've controlled the process for the last couple of cycles.

We're not going to have the US Supreme Court any longer, or the federal courts.

They slammed the door on partisan gerrymandering cases as a non justiciable political issue back in the Rucho versus Common Cause case in 2019.

So it's going to really be left up to politicians to sort of work within these new guardrails of the 2015 and the 2018 amendments.

And what we've seen again around the country is that politicians work those guardrails as aggressively as they can.

And so the League and the ACLU and all of us in the media are gonna have to be super tuned to this process and very, very watchful as it goes on.

- And it's important to mention, I think, you know, there's a lot of talk about Ohio going for Trump in 2016 and 2020.

But Jen's right, it is only 53-45 that split.

Now Biden only won seven counties, but those seven counties represent 2.7 million voters in Ohio.

So this idea that Ohio is totally one way or the other is not really the case when you look at the actual numbers here.

And that brings me to a question for Alora here.

On the ACLU Ohio's website outlining four things that you should know about the new maps is this point: To think that the new redistricting process will inherently lead to fairer more representative maps would be a mistake.

Now that's kind of depressing.

There were 1.2 million Ohioans who voted for changes to the congressional map drawing process, 2.1 million people who voted for changes to the legislative map drawing process.

And this suggests that maybe we're not guaranteed any changes at all really.

- Well, I think the question of whether you're guaranteed to change or not is an open one and it's one that we're watching.

I think, as David said, you can still manipulate the guard rails into such an extent that you get a partisan map.

And the process certainly envisions the possibility of ending up with a partisan map because both at the General Assembly process and in the process for US Congress, you can pass a four-year map.

So you can pass a map that everyone agrees only one party support, and if only one party is supporting a map, you have to ask yourself why.

And what we found through our litigation was the reason why is because the map was seriously gerrymandered, and there's still really sophisticated ways in which you can take election results and then use that information to draw a map where you can guarantee an outcome.

And to kind of go back to something that both Jen and David said, we do know in Ohio there's the possibility of drawing fairer maps.

What we were able to do during our litigation is in fact give the court several options of here are maps that could be drawn.

And in fact, we used the 2018 amendment process and all the kinds of restrictions on how you draw maps to say, here, we've done what you should be doing to draw a map in Ohio and we're able to get X number of competitive seats.

And that's what the voters want.

They want a contest where at least the possibility of a win on either side is not predetermined, and it's not electors picking their voters but voters really picking their electors.

And unfortunately there's still room for abuse in the process, and that's just something we all are gonna have to be watching.

- I think it's really instructive here to look at what happened- - Go ahead - I'm sorry.

I think it's really instructive here to look at what happened in Pennsylvania in 2018 after the state supreme court there overturned the congressional map that had been a reliable 13-5 Republican map.

They said that it violated the Free and Fair Election Clause in the state constitution.

They sent the map back to the legislature to redraw.

And the legislature came back with a map that split fewer counties, kept more towns together, lacked the crazy shapes and districts of the previous map.

And the governor didn't quite trust the legislature.

So he brought in a professor named Moon Duchin at Tufts University who runs really sophisticated computer programs that draws sample maps that can test all of the different possibilities that a map might look like.

And she ran millions of potential sample maps there and found that the previous map was the most biased one that you can almost possibly come up with.

The new map was second most biased.

So even though it looked better, it held more things together, it still had the same predictable partisan results.

So that's the kind of thing you have to be looking out for.

- I think when people, whenever I put this out on Twitter or start talking about this, there are people who have their particular representative that they would like to see drawn out.

And everybody's got a different one, I guess, but there are certainly some controversial ones that people suggest.

You think of somebody like Jim Jordan, but you know, he beat his opponent last time by 38 and a half points.

So drawing his district and drawing him out of there seems unlikely, but also on the other side of this, the representative of Congress who has the biggest margin of victory every time has been Marcia Fudge in a solidly Democratic district.

She beat her Republican opponent by 60 points.

So as these new maps are drawn and all these different things are broken down and the changes are made, are you concerned that people will be disappointed if they don't see a dramatic change, if they don't see that 8-7 map or something that is more dramatic and they might think would work better.

- Okay, so I'm not sure who you directed that to.

I think that's a hard question, Karen.

I first just wanna say- Go ahead.

I first just wanna pause for a minute and talk about the power of the people.

So the first time that the League tried to get legislation passed that would put reform on the ballot was actually in 1978.

We actually have been working on this issue for a half a century, finally getting reformed to the people.

And it's complicated and confusing because we learned that we had to have both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party agree to these provisions in order for them to pass on the ballot.

But we finally got there.

And part of that reason is because after failing many times, maybe you remember the Ballot Initiative in 2005 or in 2012, the first thing the League and Common Cause did was we created a speakers bureau and people all over the state were trained to go speak to other members of the public and explain what gerrymandering is.

This is before we had books by Dave, some of which we can't pronounce.

This was before there was a lot of conversation about it.

And we just started explaining what gerrymandering was and how it had been hurting the general public.

And then we got out our clipboards and we were definitely ready to get our initiative onto the ballot.

We decided to partner with the General Assembly again to make sure that it passed.

But what I'm saying to you is this, Ohio has got a long history of gerrymandering, both Republicans and Democrats have done it because it is a human instinct that if your team is in charge and has power to wanna solidify that and use your advantage to continue advantage into the next decade.

But here's the other thing, is that the people of Ohio demanded these reforms and now it's time for the people of Ohio to demand that mapmakers follow the letter and spirit of those reforms, that are about transparency, and public engagement, and compactness, and respecting local jurisdictional lines as much as possible.

And proportionality, this idea that the seat share should more closely mirror what we see in the general voting population.

The Minority Party does have a little more power.

There is some encouragement for bipartisanship.

And finally, if none of these things work and we get really bad maps, there's an option to take this to the Ohio Supreme Court.

So while the Federal Supreme Court is close to us at least for now, we can go to the Ohio Supreme Court.

So before we get to the other question, Karen, I just wanted to say that that, yes, this is hard.

This is not guaranteed that we're gonna get to fair maps.

But we have, I think one of the nice things about being from the League is we can take the long view, right?

We fight for things as long as we need to.

And I can assure everyone listening right here that the League will not stop until the people of Ohio have fair maps and that maps that really do respond to the people.

And one last thing I'll just mention is why this matters is because every voter is hurt with partisan gerrymandering, every voter.

If you are a Republican in a super majority state like Ohio and you have a Republican lawmaker, you're actually hurt, why?

Because once that lawmaker wins their primary, they know that they're gonna win their seat.

And once they're in their seat, they know they're gonna win again.

They don't actually have to listen to you in terms of what you need or what you want.

The same is true if you're a Democrat in a Democratic seat, I think it makes sense.

If you're a Democrat and a Republican seat, those kinds of things.

But independent, think about all of us that so many of us, about a third of us are independent and that's how we identify.

Many more of us switch our votes cross ballot.

And the fact that there's absolutely no responsiveness, that there are no swingable seats, means that we have both a state house of lawmakers as well as our congressional delegation.

That can remain completely immune to our needs and our interests, and can vote outside of our needs and interests and still get elected again.

So every voter is hurt.

And so this is my plea to you to make sure that you're participating in the process once again.

The 2015 Reform, passed by almost 72% of the vote across the state.

The 2018 for congressional maps, almost 75% in all 88 counties.

Ohioans across the state understand the need for fairness and want a fair democracy.

And it's our turn again to put pressure on these mapmakers to do a far better job than they've done before.

- Hi, Karen, I guess I'll take a stab at your- - Before we get to- Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

- I was gonna take a stab at your question about writing out certain members of Congress.

That's certainly not the purpose of the kinds of endeavors that the ACLU or the League or any of our non-partisan collaborators are interested in.

It's not to say we don't like this person so let's get them out of Congress, or we think there is a predetermined outcome that we want, so let's make that happen.

The whole purpose of these endeavors is to make a map that is responsive to the voters as Jen was saying.

I mean, the purpose is that voters should be choosing their electors and not the other way around.

Voters may watch Jim Jordan and his district.

And political geography is real.

There are certain areas that are heavily Democratic or Republican, and if you're really paying attention to compactness and continuity, then you might have a district that looks like it might be packed but the political geography is such that just that's the way the district ended up.

In Marcia Fudge's case, there was a lot of talk about Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act which requires minority representation.

And that's something that we looked at.

But what people like myself and others in this area are interested in is saying, well, how determinative is political geography is Section 2, and in what ways are these things used a shield?

And what we found was in many districts, they're using this idea of political geography or this idea that you have to have a certain percentage for a district to perform for minority voting rights as a shield and not actually doing the actual work.

And while Ohio may not be a state that's gonna have a lot of solidly Democratic districts, what we were able to show is you can get quite a few competitive districts in Ohio, four to five on top of the solid districts in one way or the other.

And that's a scenario that might be even better for democracy because it gives the voters a chance to engage, to participate.

It makes the electors more responsive to their voters 'cause they know it's not like in the bag that they're gonna get an election.

And those are the kinds of things that we're thinking about and that matter in this process, not just targeting one or not at all, like that targeting one person in the legislature or another, that's not the outcome that we're interested in.

We're interested in an outcome that gives people what they want.

- Well, before we get to some audience questions I wanna remind people that you're free to join our conversation.

If you have any questions for our speakers, you can text them to 330-541-5794.

330-541-5794.

You can also tweet them @TheCityClub and we will try to work them in.

But I want to ask one thing about, Jen entered the Ohio Supreme Court, and that's the court of last resort so to speak.

The court that maps can be appealed to.

But there's something that's very interesting that's been added to the Senate's version of the budget down here at the State House.

And it's a provision inserted by Republicans.

They dominate the Senate as well as the House.

And it says that if there is a dispute over the map that goes to the Ohio Supreme Court, the Speaker and the Senate President, both Republicans right now, would be entitled to intervene with attorneys that they would hire using taxpayer funds.

Normally the Attorney General will be the one that would represent the state before the Ohio Supreme Court.

But this would allow those two leaders who are now Republicans to use taxpayer funds to hire attorneys.

And no other state lawmaker, no Democrat, no other state lawmaker could do that.

And so I just wonder with this process just starting, this is kind of a challenging way to start the process when it feels like there's potentially partisanship right there.

And I just wanna throw that out there to you folks.

What do you think of that provision?

- I think the politicians again are going to attempt to do whatever they think they can get away with in order to try to manipulate the guardrails that have been put in place that give you such a better chance at a fair process this time than the one that you've had in recent cycles.

You look around the country, you see similar efforts like this in a state like Wisconsin, for example, where there is a Democratic attorney general.

You see efforts like this in Arizona.

Oftentimes what lawmakers in a partisan chamber are worried about is a new attorney general of the other party is elected in the middle of litigation and then they step in and perhaps pull out of that litigation in a way that the politicians might not want them to.

So certainly it's not the way you want to begin this process, but again, I think it's just so important to remember.

In 2015 in Ohio, in 2018 in Ohio, and then in 2018 in so many other states around the country, you saw tremendous victories by advocates of a democracy and independent redistricting.

You saw the victory in Florida over felony disenfranchisement, the redistricting, not just in Ohio but also in Michigan, in Colorado and Utah and Missouri.

And what you see after that is this politicians attempting to use their gerrymandered legislatures to run a backlash.

And you saw this in Florida in 2010 after citizens overwhelmingly passed a fair redistricting amendments to the state constitution, politicians getting together weeks later and coming up with a process that was just about as sneaky and untransparent as the one you had.

The League had to unwind it in court in Florida, it took five years.

And they won.

But you don't ever win this fight permanently.

It's like playing whack-a-mole, you've got to have your eyes on it all the time because as soon as you look away, the very human instinct that Jen talked about kicks back in.

This it gotta be everybody with their eyes and hands on this process in order to protect and defend what you all won in 2015 and 2018.

- And I'll just jump in and say this, that amendment you're talking about, and there's another one that has to do with really politicizing the Ohio Supreme Court.

These are amendments put into the budget.

And the purpose of this budget should be dealing with the finances of our state and the economic security of the Ohio residents.

And instead, what we have are these last minute legislative power grabs that really weaken one of the building blocks of our representational democracy which is the separation of power.

So these amendments really kind of weaken how the executive branch can handle lawsuits potentially.

It's hard to know exactly what they do, but that's in part why they have no business being in the budget.

The budget, again, should be about how we are paying for schools and how we are supporting families and how we're doing economic development.

It shouldn't be about these arcane and complicated to understand amendments that have nothing to do with money and just have to do with power grabs.

And so it is our hope that these amendments do come out of the budget and that we just continue to do diligence and thorough review of these policies so that we really understand what they do and we have a chance as the public to be part of that conversation.

- And just as a response to that, the Senate President Matt Huffman who was involved of course in the Senate budget, says that the provision is simply a push for the legislative branch to have a seat at the table as potential challenges to the map make their way through the court system.

So that's the rationale there that's been shared by the Republican President of the Senate.

So I wanna work in some audience questions here because we're getting some really good ones here.

This is one that I think has been asked before but really bears repeating.

Has there ever been any weight given to develop a computerized program that would draw the lines more equitably, at least as a place to start or as a benchmark to compare to.

And Alora, you talked about how when you were challenging the maps in court previously, you did have maps that were drawn that show that there were fair ways.

Were those done with computerized programs or is that a possibility?

- So there are a number of computer programs.

David alluded to the simulation process.

So a number of academics now have worked on various simulations which can put in the parameters that you would want for a map and then come out with guidelines.

I tend to think that those are good kind of guide posts, especially if you wanna think about intent, like, was this map drawn with the intent of partisan bias?

Well, one way to figure that out, it's to look at is this map an outlier out of all the possible universe of maps.

I'm a little bit more skeptical, and this is me personally, of using a simulation map as your final map, because one of the other things that we discussed in the map drawing process as community of interest.

And quite frankly, there's no way to computerize what is a community of interest.

A community of interest could be your neighborhood.

It could be your school district.

It could be a group of people who are living together that have certain ethnic or cultural characteristics that are similar.

And in order to really kind of fine tune that community of interest part of it, I do think you need a real person with some familiarity about the conditions on the ground who's working on those final lines to make sure that you are drawing a map that not only makes kind of computerized sense but makes a lot of on the ground sense that does not mean that there isn't a function for this computerized process.

And in fact, it can be really helpful when analyzing maps and even as a starting point.

But I would say, for your final map, you wanna have, I personally think you'd wanna have a person who's kind of looking at those lines and making sure it all makes sense.

- And it's interesting you'll hear lawmakers say that they don't wanna go that road because they were elected to do this process.

So they kind of share that opinion but maybe in a different way that they wanna be the ones that draw the maps.

So again, the map behind me is the congressional map.

But again, this process will draw maps for the Ohio House and Senate.

And we've had some major changes in the way that the state has gone just in the last 10 years.

And so those maps are still equally as important to draw those maps for House and Senate districts because that's how you develop the policies that we've been talking about and certainly the members of the commission that are gonna draw these maps.

So let me ask you, those maps are equally important but potentially won't get as much attention.

Is that a concern here as we're dominated by this thing behind us?

- We're gonna do everything we can to make sure that the public are following and participating in both processes.

I agree with you that the Ohio legislative maps are super important.

And I think we can look at any number of issues that how they get passed out of, you know, like policies that get passed out of the General Assembly and just see that they're out of touch with general everyday Ohioans.

We can take an example of reproductive choice and how most of us are somewhere in the middle of this continuum, very few of us say absolutely no abortions ever.

Very few of us say absolutely every abortion is okay.

Most of us are in this nuance.

But what we see passing in the General Assembly are absolute extremes that are out of touch with even many anti-choice voters.

And so I think whether it's gun safety or clean water, what we see as a General Assembly that once again is not held accountable by the voters because it's rigged to favor one party.

There are a few more swingable districts but really not that many.

Once again we see a situation where the real election is the primary for that seat which really benefits extremes.

And that ends up creating a super dysfunctional State House.

And we know that it's dysfunctional and we're frustrated by that.

I tend to think on any social issue, we can put a whole bunch of us in the same room and because we don't have political gains associated with it, or we're not trying to please donors or whatever, that we could actually come up with common sense solutions to a lot of our challenges here in Ohio.

And so that's our job.

Here at League and ACLU, I think it's the job of the media to demystify why the state map making process is important and how to participate in it.

- [David] Yeah, I think Jen's exactly right.

- So let me ask another audience- - There's really- - Oh, go ahead, I'm sorry, go ahead.

- There's a really staggering number here that after the 2018 election, there were 59 million Americans who lived in a state in which one or both chambers of the state legislature was controlled by the party that won fewer votes in that election.

And as Jen said, it pushes policy towards the extreme even as polls show that on a wide number of issues, even the most controversial issues that big numbers of Americans show away forward.

Where I think this is especially dangerous right now is where you see so many gerrymandered legislatures around the country going after voting rights and making voting, you know, adding additional restrictions and barriers to the processes in Texas and Florida and Georgia and Arizona, a handful of some of the most gerrymandered states in the country.

And this can have gigantic outsize impact for absolutely everybody, right?

The presidential election in Georgia was an 11, 12,000 vote victory for Joe Biden.

In Arizona it was even less than that.

So once you start having state legislatures in races that are this close, adding new restrictions, making changes to election administrations and who serves on local boards, you begin to see a situation in which that could potentially tip a presidential race.

I mean, you had 44,000 votes in three states in 2020 that made the difference between a 7.5 million of a victory in the popular vote for Joe Biden or a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College that would have been decided by gerrymandered US House delegation.

So these changes at the state level and these state legislatures have a big impact not just on policy in your state but the direction of the country.

- Wanna turn to another audience question here.

Last election Ohio was said to have lost its purple state/swing state status.

But it sounds like that isn't true if we're just looking at the population's political leanings, which we've been talking about here.

Could Ohio gain a true swing state status again in the future, could it even swing in the other direction and end up like Georgia which turned blue?

When I look back at previous maps, I mean, now Ohio hasn't been blue for a long time, but really the winds for Democrats in Ohio have been in times when there were solid blue areas but the rest of the state was lighter pink, not as bright red.

So does Ohio have a chance to get back that status of being a purple state, a swing state, and can the gerrymander or can the redistricting process without gerrymandering play a role in that?

- I'll start here, I'll say two things.

One Ohio is a state that was won in 2008 and 2012 by a Democratic presidential nominee.

You currently have a Democratic Senator.

Until 2010, one of the Houses of the General Assembly was controlled by the Democrats and other Republicans.

So I think sometimes the most recent history becomes overly determinative and that we're looking at really kind of three election cycles, maybe four of dominance of one political party.

And if you go back, before that, that's not the case.

So and as far as the role that gerrymandering can have of solving this gerrymandering question, that was definitely a question we put to the court.

And it has two components.

One is about the kind of responsiveness of your elected representatives.

And what we found was time and time again when you're in a district in which you don't have to win the Minority Party's voters or any of them at all, you tend to be less responsive to them.

And there were examples of for example congressmen not going to bi-partisan events and going to fundraisers because it didn't matter if they were getting Democrats on board.

And you never want a scenario that set up that way.

But there's real kind of then political participation outcomes that happens from that.

When elections are predetermined and your elected representatives aren't responsive to your needs, people become disenchanted with the political process.

And so we also heard on the other side voters saying, why should I even bother to participate?

The election we already know who's gonna win, my vote doesn't matter.

And in the US we make it really hard to vote.

My husband is Swedish.

When I try to explain to my Swedish relatives about the kinds of hoops that Americans have to go through just to participate, it makes no sense to them.

Voting is so easy.

People are automatically registered in other countries.

They can vote not just on one day.

The kinds of barriers that we put up already make political participation hard.

And then we're adding this additional barrier by saying, well, in certain elections the outcome's already predetermined.

And so I do think if you can get rid of partisan gerrymandering, you make the process more responsive to the will of the voters.

What you'll see is political participation going up.

And maybe in that scenario Ohio becomes competitive again.

But when people know the elections are competitive, there's very little incentive to engage in a process that's already very difficult for them.

- Another audience question here.

If reforms require maps reflect representational voting over the past 10 years, doesn't that mean maps must be significantly improved?

Can four-year maps completely ignore reforms?

And that discussion about the four-year map versus the 10-year map, talk a little bit about that whoever wants to join in on that one.

- I can start and then I encourage Alora and others.

Here's the one thing the four-year map for the congressional actually has more requirements to it.

So even though it would be a four-year map rather than a 10, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be, there are still things that we, there's still ways to deal with that.

So if it's very gerrymandered and it's not meeting those additional requirements, then I think that map makers should expect a case before the Ohio Supreme Court quite quickly.

One of the nice things about bringing things to the courts is courts are, judges are supposed to be non-partisan, they don't make the law, they judge the law.

And I think what I found when we go to the courts to these kinds of things is that there's a lot of openness among judges to really think about the impacts and the concerns that we have about the maps.

So I would not say that we're definitely gonna get four-year maps, I hope we 10-year maps in part because it's a lot of effort for all of us to then have to repeat four years from now.

But again, I just wanna say, I think more than anything, it wasn't that the Ohio Republican Party really wanted to work with the League and the Democratic Party to put amendments on the ballot in 2015 and 2018.

They were forced, the public wanted it.

And so once again that's where we play a part, and I'm sorry to be that broken record.

But that's our job, is to make sure folks are participating as voters and as advocates.

And so I do encourage anyone who's interested to volunteer, to donate, to become a League member, to have a speaker come to your group, to participate in our map making competition in the fall to go to fairdistrictsohio.org and you can find ways to get involved.

And just to remind you, we are not at all concerned about parties and candidates.

We're concerned about voters and making sure that representation works for all Ohioans.

- Well, let me ask another audience question here.

During the last redistricting effort, the map was approved by prominent black leaders to try to preserve the presence of minority representation even if it meant 12 to four elections for a decade.

How do good government advocates navigate the tension between preservation of political power possibly undermining the possibility of pursuing more balance in future elected officials?

So I think that there's a real question here on how do you move through that process?

- So just to make sure I understand the question, the question is about minority voting rights representation?

Yeah, okay.

So this is something I've been spending a lot of time thinking about.

So I'm just gonna jump in.

I think there is a fallacy that good government and minority representation are at odds with one another.

And that fallacy we often see in many states, Ohio is one of them.

So taking for example what was formerly Marcia Fudge's district, we heard that her district was drawn in such a way to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

And so that was something that we were very concerned about because we're very concerned at the ACLU at the League of Women Voters, at APRI which was another plaintiff in the case with minority voting rights.

And we don't wanna dismantle gains that have been made by minorities in any district.

And so we took those concerns very seriously.

But what we found was that minority voting rights was being used as a shield.

And in fact, what the mapmakers didn't do is the kind of work that you need to do to ensure minority voting rights which is actually conducting an analysis of the voting patterns of minority voters within districts to see at what level do districts need to perform.

They just kind of said, well, we think it needs to be 53%, which is not what any of the case law says.

And what we did was actually hire someone who specializes in Section 2 analysis to do an analysis of the Cleveland area and say at what level does this district need to be drawn so that it is meeting Section 2 and it is meeting the needs of the community members there.

And we didn't even just do that for Cleveland.

We said, well, where are the other places where you see a significant numbers and this in Ohio's case of African-Americans.

And so we looked at the numbers in Columbus.

We looked at the numbers in Cincinnati.

And what we found was we were able to draw a map that was more competitive on a partisan basis and that was fair to Ohio voters and had the same level of African-Americans in Columbus and more African-Americans in Cincinnati in a district than there is in the current map.

And that's 'cause we actually spent the time to kind of do the analysis.

And if you look at Cincinnati, I mean, Cincinnati is a Democratic state and a state, sorry, not state, A Democratic city that's represented by two Republicans partly 'cause the city's cut in half.

And actually cutting the city in half, you are weakening minority rights within the city and you're making it worse for Democrats than you would if you kept the city whole.

So being very intentional about it and looking at those processes, we were able to disprove this myth that minority voting rights and partisan fairness are at opposite ends of the spectrum and you get one or the other.

- So I just wanna be explicitly clear.

What we found in this research is that Marcia Fudge's district did not need to extend into Summit County.

And I think we can argue that African-Americans would have more power if their votes weren't so diluted, and again, that the map was designed with predetermined outcomes.

- Well, I wanna get David in with a couple of questions that I've gotten, all on the same kind of topic just phrased differently.

Several people are asking how they can get involved to hold the mapmakers accountable, to get to a map that's a little bit closer to a 9-6 or whatever.

And like I said, you literally wrote the book on it.

So what would you suggest to people who are trying to preserve a process that they think they're very concerned about?

- It's a great question.

These maps and these district lines are really the building blocks of our democracy.

And when they get twisted by partisans, it twist the very nature of outcomes and policy and elections.

What I wanna say is that when citizens get together, we can still make big change.

What Jen said earlier I think is really important.

Republicans and Democrats in Ohio did not want to compromise on this.

They had to be forced to the table because all of you stood up and put political pressure on them to do so.

You said that it was important.

Gerrymandering used to be this process that put people to sleep, right?

It reminded you of civics class, the word even sounds boring.

And what politicians do is they count on that in order to make people think that this is dull, that it's math, it's maps, and then they push it into their bunkers and their back rooms and they draw the lines that they want to have.

We need to force that process back into the open.

When there are public hearings on this, you should take part and show up and talk about what a community of interest is.

This is the same thing that we saw in Virginia where the politicians there did not wanna give up control of this process.

The people showed up, they showed up at lobby days.

You all had done the same thing in Columbus.

They made clear that they were watching that this process mattered.

What the 2018 and other elections have have shown on these democracy initiatives is that they unite Democrats, Republicans and Independents who still believe very deeply in notions of fairness, in notions of responsive elections, majority rule.

Your neighbors care about this, talk about it, show up, this fight is our fight.

- I'm gonna jump in here.

Karen Kasler of the Ohio Public Radio Statehouse News Bureau, thank you so much for moderating our conversation.

And you've been listening to a panel conversation about redistricting featuring Alora Thomas-Lundberg, she's senior staff attorney with the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU.

Jen Miller, Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio.

And Dave Daley, author of "Unrigged: How Americans Are "Battling Back to Save Democracy."

Our forum today was presented in collaboration with the League of Women Voters of Greater Cleveland.

Thanks to the members, sponsors and donors and others who support the City Club's mission to create conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

This was exactly what that was today.

So again, thank you to Karen Kasler for moderating.

I'm Dan Moulthrop, our forum is now adjourned.

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