Jon Husted, Ohio Secretary of State, was pretty roundly … um … well, let’s use the word "criticized" for his role in putzing up Ohio elections last year.
He tried to reduce the number of days allowed for early voting in the state, but only in some places.
He made clear his shenanigans were aimed at reducing the urban vote (that is to say,the unAmerican "people" who populate the state's cities) and encouraging more rural votes (where real Americans live, by George).
Time after time, he finagled the rules — they seemed to change every day in the weeks leading up to election day — to great opposition from, you know, unAmerican lawyers, creating great confusion about when, where, and how to vote.
I was working for the Obama campaign at the time, a member of the much-vaunted team playing the ground game, and ran into the confusion. I advised as best I could, and my advice ran increasingly toward vote by mail. Took a little effort on the part of the voter, a phone number (which I had) and a postage stamp, but had the virtue of being checkable, so you at least knew the state had your vote in hand before election day.
Husted’s 2010 campaign against the previous Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, largely consisted of criticism of his perceived notion that she was doing similar things. but from the Democratic side of the political ledger.
At any rate, he was elected in 2010 by a pretty good margin, joining a Republican sweep of state government.
I thought he was doing a decent job as secretary of state, or at least saying the right things, about Ohioans and their right to vote in his first year in office. So I was moderately surprised when what appeared to be a campaign of voting obstructions began and it appeared to be orchestrated by none other than Husted.
Et tu, Jon?
We haven’t heard much from Husted since the end of the campaign, but today an article from the Columbus Dispatch appeared in the Dayton Daily News, headlined (in the DDN) “Husted urges end to hyper-partisanship.”
Husted is publicly urging the Ohio Constitutional Modernization Commission, an obscure state commission (Ohio government is jam-packed with such things), to recommend changes to the way Ohio draws legislative and congressional districts.
Husted noted that, while Republican legislators properly and legally followed the district mapping process in 2010, some of the districts they created had strangely weird borders (especially the snake that slithered along the south shore of Lake Erie and married the U.S. congressional districts of Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur).
If you need a modern day definition of Gerrymandering in graphic form, there it is.
The result was President Obama won the state in the 2012 presidential election by three percentage points, while Republicans won huge majorities in the state General Assembly and in the U.S congressional delegation.
Without specifying or proposing a method, Husted noted this partisanship and the winning of office therein had the (possibly) unintended effect of making the ability to work with members of the other party to solve complex problems nearly impossible.
Interestingly, at least one prominent member of the Ohio Republican House appeared to agree with Husted, at least in principle. The issue “is something we want to deal with sooner rather than later,” said William G. Batchelder, House Speaker. Batchelder is co-chairman of the Constitutional Modernization Commission.
His co-chairman, Rep. Vernon Sykes, Democrat from Akron agreed with Batchelder, and would like to see a recommendation before the public in time for the 2014 ballot.
What form this recommendation would take is, of course, unknown. We can note that a proposal for modifying the way districts are drawn failed badly in the 2012 election. It proposed a nonpartisan commission to redraw future districts in the state, not unlike the plan in California from a few years ago. It was attacked by (mostly) Republicans because of the implied egg-headedness of it and because it would eliminate politicians from the redistricting process.
And here many of us thought those unselfish, fair-minded politicians were exactly the problem. Go figure.
Regardless of how all this turns out, I think it’s time to recognize that even though Husted may be a partisan Republican to the core, he recognizes that something has gone off the rails with regard to redistricting.
That’s one small step for a Husted. One giant step for a partisan Republican politician.