Voters Take The Wheel On Fixing Gerrymandering

Days after the November 2016 election, a coordinator at a recycling non-profit wrote a Facebook post asking if her fellow Michigan residents were interested in coming together to “take on gerrymandering.”

Katie Fahey’s casual social media request ended up morphing into a statewide, all-volunteer movement to draft a ballot proposal to overhaul how the Great Lake State’s congressional and state legislative district lines are drawn. The push by that group, which came to be known as Voters Not Politicians, ended up gathering over 100,000 more signatures than the 316,000 needed to get the measure on Michigan’s November 2018 ballot.

Across the country, voters are engaging in similar mobilizations at the state level to take the wheel on the seemingly unsexy issue of redistricting reform. Comparable efforts to get reform measures on the ballot are underway in Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado and Utah, and Ohio will vote May 8 on a legislative-backed proposal that was spurred by grassroots activism. Good government groups are pushing legislatures in Illinois and Pennsylvania to take similar action.

The aim of the reforms: to either wrest control of the process away from partisan lawmakers and turn it over to independent arbiters, or, in some cases, to make sure maps are drawn with bipartisan consensus.


This ground-level approach bypasses the meandering pace of the courts, where gerrymandering challenges dragged on for years before landing before the Supreme Court. The justices are expected to issue a ruling on gerrymandering by June, but how far it will go to rein in the practice remains unclear. The grassroots campaigns also sideline the national partisan groups working to give their party more control of the redistricting process by winning control of key statehouses and governorships.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/voters-push-redistricting-reform-ohio-michigan-nationwide






November 2018 cannot get fast enough