Ohio Models Social Participation & Collaboration in Government

With the goal of demonstrating how a process of public dialogue can lead to a fairer and more practical legislative redistricting of the state, the State of Ohio held the “Ohio Redistricting Competition”, soliciting public plans for the drawing of legislative districts. The competition resulted in fourteen submitted plans that were reviewed under objective criteria, three of which will be considered by the Ohio General Assembly.

The political issue of redistricting is one that is continuously raised. The realistic possibility of empowering one political party over the other through gerrymandering or back-room dealing is a detriment to our democratic society and is difficult to avoid within the legislative body that create them. The state of Ohio is not immune to such highly politicized processes and has its own problems of unequally distributed voting districts that favor one party over another. Beginning in the mid 1970s, Ohioans and organizations such as the League of Women Voters of Ohio and Common Cause Ohio voiced concern with the improprieties of the state’s legislative districts.

To help avoid such polemics within the allocation of voting districts, the Ohio Secretary of State office held a month long competition that allowed regular Ohio citizens to create their own unbiased district map. Through nine months of planning by the League of Women Voters of Ohio, Ohio Citizen Action, Common Cause, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, Former State Representative Joan Lawrence, and State Representative Dan Stewart, the competition set out to produce citizen-made district maps that could be judged and submitted to the Ohio General Assembly for redistricting consideration. With a partnership between the state and ArcGIS software (a product of ESRI), the Ohio Secretary of State’s website was able to offer a free download of the map building software for those who wanted to participate in the competition. By streaming a video tutorial of the software given by the project manager, Dr. Mark Salling of Cleveland State University, through Youtube on the same website, contestants could learn how the ArcGIS program worked.

The Secretary of State’s website formally accepted entries from April 10, 2009 to May 11, 2009 from those who had registered free online for the competition. Based off of requirements of population equality, contiguity, and cooperation with the National Voting Rights Act, a panel of judges, assembled from an independent consulting firm, scored each district entry based on four categories. With a maximum score of 75, each map entry was rated on compactness of the district shapes, maintaining communities of interest, competitiveness created for both political parties, and representational fairness. Those plans not meeting the necessary three requirements were automatically disqualified, while all the plans that scored in the top 25% were considered winners and put up for consideration by the Ohio General Assembly, whose job it is to decide legislative redistricting.

Ohio’s Redistriciting Competition proved to be a great success and out of 14 plans entered, 3 were declared winners on May 18, 2009. Based off of the strict scoring criteria, it was even reported that the worst rated entry was considerably better than the state’s 2000 redistricting model, which had been adopted. While the competition did not attract the widespread news attention it might have desired, it still proved to be worthwhile and highly efficient in creating plausible redistricting plans. The real test of this competition’s success though, will be seen by how much the three winning plans will actually be considered by the state’s General Assembly.

Through this competition it was seen that by fueling the conversation among the public through an innovative and accessible contest, objective legislative recommendations could be made by ordinary citizens. By offering strict guidelines, the free tools contestants could use, and excellent judgment scales, the Ohio Redistricting Plan resulted in three reasonable solutions to one of the most difficult legislative problems in America.

This case study was written in collaboration with Owen Davis and Daniel Honker