Good News About Voters First Ohio

Voters First Ohio, the campaign to create a nonpartisan commission to draw Ohio's legislative and congressional districts, announced today that they have turned in a total of 750,000 signatures to place the issue on Novembers ballot.

That's close to double what is required. This makes it very likely that the issue will be on the ballot, despite an extraordinarily high rate of disqualification of the first batch of signatures.

There'll probably be a battle as Republicans try to pitch out signatures right and left. And if they fail there, they're already plotting to spend huge money to lie to voters about what this issue is about. I wrote about that last week:

http://www.ohiodailyblog.com/content/destroying-ohio-democracy-while-cla...

We've already seen a sample of what they will say. They're claiming this "takes away" your "right" to vote for the people who do redistricting — never mind they aren't thinking about voters at all when they perform this incidental task voters weren't thinking about when they voted for them, and never mind that these legislators that MOST of us don't vote for didn't even actually DO the redistricting this time. It was done by a secret team of unelected GOP consultants overseen by John Boehner's staff — which means voters in 17 districts had no say whatsoever. And the voters in Oh-08 had no idea they were voting for this.

One state legislator even laughably claimed the new process isn't completely transparent in every single aspect — never mind that the current redistricting wasn't transparent in ANY aspect.

We should be finding out very soon whether the Republicans concede that the issue has qualified for the ballot and begin trying to drown it in lies.

Meanwhile, you can sign up for the effort to help replace Ohio's broken and outrageously skewed system of drawing districts by going to http://votersfirstohio.com.

This is important. It's fair to every voter — Republican, Democrat, independent and third-party (and the latter two are represented equally with Republicans and Democrats in the new system, making domination by one major party close to impossible). If passed, it will also convene the commission to redistrict for the next election, which is why Ohio Republicans are so hysterical and angry. They gave themselves a walloping advantage, the likes of which we haven't seen before. It would be gone after a single election cycle, replaced by districts that more accurately reflect how the voters of Ohio vote.

We need to get this done.