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As the Census Bureau marshals its resources for the decennial census on April 1, other forces are at work to determine where the political lines in Ohio are drawn.
Robert Wiley at Ohio University has been working on that project under a contract with the state for three years. He said this week that time is getting short.
Wiley and his group in Athens are busy creating the geographic outlines into which the 2020 Census data will be fed, assembling the massive database with which the Legislative Redistricting Commission will work in determining where the boundaries of Ohio’s 99 House and 33 Senate districts will fall, and its congressional districts as well.
The new map created from that data will be used in the 2022 general election and all the subsequent elections for the following 10 years. With the 2030 Census, the process will begin again.
The state General Assembly districts and federal congressional district boundaries determine more than elections. The census data within those boundaries can have a long-lasting impact for communities and their residents on wide array of state and federal funding decisions.
“We’re preparing a geographic, unified database,” Wiley said. “After the Census and the 2020 election, it will be combined to facilitate redistricting, but we’re not actually involved in the redistricting decisions, per se.”
Developments in technology, especially the hardware and software for Geographical Information Systems, has made the work significantly different than it was even as recently as the 2010 Census. Wiley said he hopes those advances, and possibly others to come, will make that work easier for the next one.
“The state could have been pulling all that information for the past 10 years, but it didn’t,” he said. “We’re going to recommend that they set up so the boundaries and voter databases are continually updated, so that when 2030 comes, we just have to push a button. We have the capability to do that.”
With expected population shifts, political boundaries in the state are likely to change significantly. Weak population growth in the state over the past 10 years makes it likely that Ohio will lose one congressional district. It now has 16, and reducing that to 15 means the federal electoral map will need to be redrawn entirely to even out representation among the remaining districts. The House of Representatives is fixed by law at 435 members, which means every 10 years states with high population growth acquire new congressional districts, and those with weak growth or decline lose them.
Washington County will almost certainly drop below 60,000 in population. Although the Census includes many things, big surprises are not one of them. The agency is continually monitoring trends ranging from total population counts to business trends and demographic information through programs such as the annual population estimates and the American Community Survey.
The county is now split between state house districts 94 and 95, but population declines could necessitate making those districts geographically larger.
The county has been part of Congressional District Six since 1992, but the shape of the district has changed over time. It now lies in a long arc along the Ohio River Valley, from the middle of Mahoning County southward to the bend of the river in Lawrence County, a distance of nearly 300 miles. District Six from 2002 to 2012 lay entirely in southern Ohio, from Washington County in the east to Warren County in the west.
The state and federal maps often reflect the political ambitions of the party in power at the time the maps are drawn, and Ohio’s 2012 map was declared unconstitutional this year, with the judge noting that in each election since the map came into use, the state elected an overwhelming disproportionate number of Republicans relative to the total vote. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in a similar set of cases from Maryland and North Carolina, however, mooted the Ohio case and the 2020 elections will use the same map.
Wiley said he is relying heavily on county boards of elections to provide him with the accurate precinct information on which the geographical database is being built.
“The boards of elections know their precincts better than anybody, and they can help us make sure that geography is reflected in the material to redistrict,” he said. “We’re trying to get everyone corralled, we have these time limits. We’ve got eight million voters, 88 counties, 20 to 30 precincts per county, there are literally thousands of pieces to this.
Wiley said Washington County has been one of the more cooperative jurisdictions.
Washington County Board of Elections deputy director Peggy Byers was at a conference earlier this month where Wiley made a presentation.
“The ultimate idea is to make districts more even and not so politicized,” she said. “They want us to make some corrections, some of the lines are a little out of whack. Most of our district are townships, and they’re not a problem, we work with the boundary lines, but in the cities and villages there are a few things to correct. Our biggest problem is the city of Marietta, for example the Third Ward. We’re still working on getting the information to him.”
“We just want to make the geography and voter locations as accurate as possible,” Wiley said. “It determines allocation of funds and resources, representation … everything is linked to this geography in one way or another.”
The Census and redistricting
• Robert Wiley group acquires information from county boards of election as geographic outlines for inserting Census data, January 2020.
• Census Day, April 1, 2020.
• Census releases 2020 count data, March 2021.
• Data is parsed into geographic location files, provided to the Ohio Redistricting Commission by May 2021.
• The redistricting commission draws electoral maps, both for Ohio Legislature of 99 House districts and 33 Senate districts, and subsequently Congressional Districts, of which there currently are 16.
• To become valid, the maps need the support of at least three of the four Legislative members of the commission, and at least one of those voting in favor must be a member of the minority party.
• The district plan for the General Assembly (state government) must be adopted by Sept. 1, 2021 for use in the November 2022 elections.
Source: Times research.