God Bless America, Ohio Secretary of State Edition

Summer 2009: I move to Ohio. Shortly after my move, I head off to the BMV to get my driver's license, set up my address, register to vote, etc

October 2010: I head online to see where I am supposed to vote in the upcoming elections. Answer? Nowhere, because Ohio somehow failed to register me the year before, and it was now a couple days past the deadline. Yet Michigan had already unregistered me. What the heck? Anyway, after a couple of phone calls it was clear I was disenfranchised for this cycle. But at least I was finally properly registered!

July 2011: I move overseas, but maintain my Ohio voting privileges. This requires sending in a form called an FPCA in order to enroll in the Ohio overseas voter / military system. The ballot is emailed to me, I print it, fill it out, sign it, and send it back, along with some other documentation like a copy of my driver's license.

October 2012: I send in my first overseas ballot, carefully following the instructions.

Summer, 2013: My parents receive a letter stating I am being purged from the Ohio voter rolls for living with them in Michigan. Oh, and apparently I didn't vote in 2012. Even though I did. It appears my vote was tossed for unknown reasons. A letter exchange with Cuyahoga county solved the registration issue, but of course not the lost vote, which will forever remain a mystery.

September 2014: It now appears I have been booted from the overseas voter system, probably during the failed purge, and have to reapply. Fortunately, I caught this issue with a week to spare and will be sending in my new FPCA (along with a nasty note) in short order.

Anyone want to bet that Ohio will find a way to disenfranchise me a third time?

On Gerrymandering...

Gerrymandering - the process of drawing political districts in such a manner as to favor your political party - is an abhorrent abomination and its existence representative of a major flaw in our Constitution. At the US Congressional level, it has become so bad that Republicans were able to capture a solid majority of seats while getting fewer votes than Democrats. One question that came to my mind was to ask how common such an occurrence was, so I dug up the data going back to the WWII era (via Wikipedia), and combined it below.

In the 34 election cycles represented, only three times - 1952, 1996, and 2012, did a party win a majority of seats without winning the two-party vote. All three times favored Republicans. On only three other occasions (1994, 2008, 2010) did the party that won the two-party vote receive a smaller share of seats than share of votes (1994 pro-Democrat, 2008/10 pro-Republican). You would expect this to be rare in a winner-take-all districting system. Indeed, if people were distributed homogenously with respect to partisanship, 50.1% of the vote would be enough to capture every seat! Clearly, we are not distributed homogenously, so the minority party still receives substantial representation. However, in 28/34 elections, they have won fewer seats than their share of the vote.

So is there evidence of gerrymandering in that data? Yes, substantially evidence in fact, with a huge turning point coming in 1994. I have plotted share of vote versus share of seats below, split before and after the "Republican Revolution" of 1994.

Prior to 1994, there was clearly a pro-Democratic bias to the data, with Democrats receiving approximately 24 more seats than Republicans for the same share of votes. However, Democrats were winning those elections by substantial margins and basically this amounted to padding their already formidable lead. At no point did they ever steal control of the House. In fact during this stretch, Republicans managed to swipe one election.

In contrast, a sea change occurred in 1994. Not only did Republicans start winning elections, but the gerrymandering flipped in their favor, with an approximate 14 seat advantage since that time. A careful look at the data reveals something else as well: the slopes of the lines have changed significantly. Prior to 1994, a 1% change in the vote resulted in a shift of about 7.9 seats. Post 1994, this has shifted to only 3.7 seats, implying that incumbents are much more heavily protected than they used to be. This also implies that Republican's 14 seat advantage is actually harder to dislodge than the old 24-seat Democratic advantage, because the latter could be beaten with a 3% vote advantage while the current Republican advantage would take a 4% victory to defeat. In fact, it is likely worse than that now. The 2012 election, which occurred after very favorable redistricting for Republicans, resulted in Republicans capturing 234 seats vs a predicted 214 for the model, an over-performance of 20 seats. This districting, which is largely fixed until the 2022 elections, could be giving Republicans as much as a 6% advantage in the vote, implying Democrats would need to capture around 53% of the total vote just to win a bare majority. At no time in our modern history has such a wide gap existed.

I find it ironic that the Founder's will has been flipped on its head. Originally, Senators were chosen by the state legislatures, and Representatives, in accordance with the Constitution, were chosen by the people. The 17th amendment resulted in direct election of Senators by the people, but gerrymandering has largely caused the House election to be controlled by the state legislatures who draw the districts!

I call on all my fellow citizens to help end the practice of gerrymandering, by taking districting out of patently partisan hands and moving it to a commission-based model that has been successful in a number of states with respect to drawing more compact, fairer, and more competitive districts.