Dave Arredondo’s comments on voting NO on Issue 1 ignore why the issue is on the ballot. Describing the Congressional districts as geographically compact is to be blind to the map.
Districts 4, 5, & 9 sprawl over half of Ohio from the Indiana border. Dave’s Lorain county in District 5 is in the same district as three counties on the Indiana border. The slicing and dicing of Districts 1, 8, & 10 in the southwest corner is obvious. District 13 wanders from Columbus. District 7 carefully carved up Cuyahoga county.
Touting the performance of current members of the redistricting commission ignores that the Ohio Supreme Court ruled their mapping unconstitutional multiple times. They ignored every one of those rulings in the subsequent maps they produced. Republicans like Dave don’t support Issue 1 because it won’t allow them to pick their voters as they have. There are about 1.5 million registered Republicans and about 800,000 registered Democrats, but also 5.7 million unaffiliated voters, hardly the basis for claiming the state is solidly “Red”.
There are many reasons to vote YES for Issue 1, not least of which is to get Ohio’s congressional delegation off the current list of “most gerrymandered states”.
Matt Nousak, Geneva