The League of Women Voters and Common Cause Ohio issued a report last week containing emails and other documents showing how GOP operatives worked secretly to redraw Ohio's congressional district maps so that they would get a solid 8 seat advantage among the Ohio congressional contingent.
These people rented a secret room in a hotel so they could hide the documents while they worked on altering democracy to suit their narrow financial and political interests.
A three judge panel recently found Ohio's redistricting to be unconstitutional, and has told the state to redraw the boundaries. The state plans to appeal the decision. After seeing these documents that were requested by the League of Women Voters of Ohio and Common Cause Ohio, it's hard to imagine why someone isn't facing jail time.
The GOP in Ohio worked with John Boehner's office to design the most favorable districts possible. Not only did they do it just for votes, but they did it for money.
In one case, a request was made to include a portion of the map in a district because a company named Timkin would then be able to donate. The representative in that district, Jim Renacci, then received 124,000 dollars from those associated with the business.
Jane Timkin, board member, gave at least 174,000 dollars between 2010 and 2015. She rose to become the Chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. (This is how her title is stated on the GOP website).
In another instance, GOP operatives discussed finding Republican voters, and then figuring out ways to include them in the newly drawn maps. From this email, we can see that they are listing streets where they expect to find reliable voters and donors.
They even go on later to say that this redistricting will save them millions! My guess is that they think they won't need to spend as much on outreach if they have reliable voters.
Please read the entire article. It is infuriating.
They did this all so they could get a reliable 12-4 ratio of Republicans to Democrats in Ohio's 16 congressional seats. How is this not completely criminal?