By S.M. | NEW YORK
A BOOK-LENGTH opinion striking down Ohio’s congressional map by a panel of three federal judges on May 3rd was written with one particular readership in mind—the justices of the Supreme Court. They have the last word on whether the constitution imposes limits on partisan line-drawing. The federal judges, appointees of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, explained how Ohio’s map was rigged to ensure that 12 of the state’s 16 seats in the House of Representatives would go to Republicans despite voters’ fairly even red-blue divide. The ruling concludes that “a predominant partisan intent infected the whole map” in violation of the federal constitution, and orders the state to introduce a remedial map by June 14th. (If the deadline passes without an acceptable map, the court will have one drawn up.) But with an appeal on its way to the Supreme Court—and similar cases pending there involving gerrymanders in Maryland and North Carolina—the staying power of the ruling against Ohio’s map is in the hands of the nine justices.
The 301-page ruling opens with a detailed account of how Ohio’s “remarkably pro-Republican redistricting bill” was crafted and adopted without Democratic input after the 2010 census. Republican legislators gathered in a DoubleTree hotel room stripped of its usual furnishings and, using three computers, ran “Maptitude”, software that allows cartographers to draw lines “down to the census block unit” and see “corresponding demographic and historical election data for the newly drawn districts in real time”. By the time the draughtsmen unveiled the maps to the legislature, the district lines had been tweaked and polished with the help of Republican consultants masterminding similar efforts in other states. Governor John Kasich signed House Bill 369 into law on September 26th 2011.
