A Few Thoughts…

So, as those in Ohio may know (or should know) there are five state issues on the November ballot. From what I’ve read of them so far, I don’t particularly like any of them. But the one that stands out as being just plain stupid is #4, which is “To provide for the creation of a state redistricting commission with responsibility for creating legislative districts”. Here’s paragraph 4 of the amendment:

Provide that the commission must adopt a qualifying plan with the highest “competitiveness number,” as defined in the proposed Amendment. The Amendment defines the “competitiveness number” of a plan by a mathematical formula, that is the product of the number of balanced districts multiplied by two, plus the total number of other remaining competitive districts, minus the total number of unbalanced uncompetitive districts multiplied by two. The competitiveness number for a general assembly plan is the sum of the competitiveness number for the house of representatives districts and the competitiveness number for the senate districts. Provide that the “measure of competition” of a legislative district be based on a calculation using the two average partisan indexes for the district, which are calculated on the basis of the percentage of votes received by each of the two partisan candidates who received the two highest vote totals statewide in each of the three closest general elections during the four previous even-numbered years prior to adopting a redistricting plan, keeping the index for one of the partisan affiliations always as the minuend and the index for the other partisan affiliation always as the subtrahend from district to district throughout a redistricting plan.

Now, I consider myself a bit of a math geek (reading textbooks on elliptic curves on the bus ride to work would make you think of yourself that way too – though, that was a while ago), but I think I’m gonna need to get out a pencil and paper and write out the equation for this one. I’ll post that in the morning, when I can think a little clearer.

That said, don’t we already have legislative districts? It seems as though this is wanting to make partisan districts! That just seems crazy! What’s the point? Does it make it easier for the candidates to know where they’ll be welcomed and where they’ll get eggs thrown at them? I’m also going to look into who sponsored this bill, and maybe write them an email to see what they were thinking!

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 22nd, 2005 at 00:20 and is filed under Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.