And the ‘Oscar’ goes to Dewine, Faber, Larose for gerrymandering
Three state officials – Gov. Mike Dewine, State Auditor Keith Faber and Secretary of State Frank Larose – shouldn’t expect Oscars:
Their pleas of helplessness in the face of the Bob Cupp-matt Huffman General Assembly gerrymander is one of the Statehouse’s less believable scripts.
Dewine, as governor, is constitutionally considered to hold Ohio’s “supreme executive power.” Roughly 39,000 state employees answer to him or his appointees. The governor is the steward of a $74 billion general revenue fund budget, any penny of which he could have item vetoed. And Dewine has the power to cut state spending.
As auditor, every public official’s business is also Keith Faber’s business, a fact well-known by GOP Gov. James A. Rhodes. Knowledge is power and Rhodes used it to reach the governorship – four times. And Secretary of State Frank Larose, among other duties, oversees Ohio’s elections and appoints Ohio’s 88 county Boards of Elections.
To become governor, Dewine got the votes of 2.23 million Ohioans. Faber got the votes of 2.15 million Ohioans to become auditor. As for Larose, 2.21 million Ohioans voted for him.
Bob Cupp, a Lima Republican, is speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives,
with – depending on the day of the week – the backing of many of the 63 other Republicans in Ohio’s 99-member House. Huffman, also a Lima Republican, is president of 33member Senate, with the backing of the 24 other Republicans in the 33-seat Senate. In 2020, Cupp won his House seat with the votes of 39,000 people – about 1.7% of Dewine’s statewide vote. And Huffman won his Senate seat with the votes of 129,000 people – about 5.8% of Dewine’s statewide vote.
Meanwhile, Cupp and Huffman are just two of the seven members of the Redistricting Commission, the votercreated panel whose job is to align – fairly align – Ohio’s 99 House and 33 Senate districts with 2020’s Census of Ohio’s population.
Besides Cupp, Huffman, Dewine, Faber and Larose – all Republicans – the seven-member commission includes two Akron Democrats, state Sen. Vernon Sykes and his daughter, House Minority Leader Emilia Sykes, who are African American.
In one of the starkest Ohio triumphs of hope over experience in Ohio, voters last decade overwhelmingly approved creation of the Redistricting Commission. The premise was that it would prevent the seamy partisan antics of the old Apportionment Board, which magically seemed to draw General Assembly districts that favored the board’s majority – Democrats in 1971 and 1981, Republicans in 1991, 2001, and 2011.
But that assumed that Ohio as such