The White House Hunger Games: VRA Cancelled

[Sheepocalypse]

I don't live in VA but I work there, so I'll visit some Virginia related subreddits every so often. Of course, we can all guess that they were all in support of the Democrat lead gerrymandering and were throwing a parade when it passed. I saw a bunch of comments like;

"We're gonna Fairfax VA sooooo hard!"

"Hopefully we Fairfax other states, too."

And other pro-political gentrification bullstuff. Now that the vote was struck down, these same people are crying and throwing a fit and I've never been happier to open Reddit. Get absolutely forgeted.
"Oh so you're fine with the GOP doing it to Texas?" No, but my hatred for entitled Redditoids is leaps and bounds more deep than my dislike for the GOP. And that's saying something.

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[Rigel]

"it's good when my team does it" handicaps need to get a good thumping

[Swholli]

Yeah, in Ohio we've had a Republican trifecta virtually thirty years, not counting the one or two time the governor was a Democrat or the senate flipped blue for two years, it's closer to 40.

In my lifetime I've never seen "the other team" gerrymander because the Republicans gerrymandered themselves into a perpetual power cycle. I'm opposed to either party doing it, but the reason the Republicans are currently in the hot seat is because they've been doing it since Reagan.

Of course gerrymandering is bad when either party does it and, again here in Ohio, our supreme court has ruled their maps unconstitutional and they've just... ignored the ruling. Then they changed the way the wording was on a bill to end their illegal gerrymandering so that voters who were opposed accidentally voted yes because of the wording.

Republicans are cheaters, through and through, and they manufactured the "Democrats cheat by adding dead people to the rolls or illegal immigrants are voting" bullstuff (all of which is demonstrably untrue) so they could draw away attention away from their own cheating.

[Goth77]

Of course gerrymandering is bad when either party does it and, again here in Ohio, our supreme court has ruled their maps unconstitutional and they've just... ignored the ruling. Then they changed the way the wording was on a bill to end their illegal gerrymandering so that voters who were opposed accidentally voted yes because of the wording.

you got this part backwards, the NO votes actually won because of the change in the bill wording, which is why Annoying Orange encouraged people to vote NO because voting YES would have stopped the redistricting.

see https://www.commoncause.org/ohio/resources/the-battle-to-end-gerrymandering-in-ohio/ and https://www.citizensnotpoliticians.org/

that being said, Since 1900, Ohio has voted Democratic 37.5% of the time and Republican 62.5% of the time. We've been a republican state for over a century - even if YES on issue 1 passed, I don't think it would have changed much of anything.

[Swholli]

you got this part backwards, the NO votes actually won because of the change in the bill wording, which is why Annoying Orange encouraged people to vote NO because voting YES would have stopped the redistricting.

Nope. I know how it was worded, and it was bullstuff.

If Issue 1 passes, the district-drawing commission would have to draw districts reflecting the actual political makeup of Ohio. If voters in a state were split 60–40 between Democrat and Republican voters, there would be six likely Democratic districts and four likely Republican districts. The commission couldn’t gerrymander the boundaries of these districts to give Democrats eight or nine or 10 reliable districts. I’d argue that this is a reasonable way to choose district boundaries.

Issue 1 would “establish a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor either of the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio, according to a formula based on partisan outcomes as the dominant factor.”

Ballot language is written by the Ohio Ballot Board, which has five members, three of whom are Republicans. It is chaired by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, and the other members were appointed by politicians.

From your actual source, CommonCause:

After the census in 2020, a drawn out redistricting process in 2021 and 2022 ended in heartbreak for redistricting advocates. The politicians on the Ohio Redistricting Commission (ORC) – including the governor, auditor, and secretary of state – could not resist the temptation to rig maps to favor themselves and their political party. They drew districts in secret and manipulated the maps to advantage the political party in power. All seven maps drawn by the ORC (two for US Congress and five sets of Ohio House and Senate maps) were struck down as unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court.

The Ohio Redistricting Commission ignored the Ohio Supreme Court – and the will of the voters – by repeatedly approving gerrymandered districts. They made it clear that the pressure or desire to manipulate district lines was simply too much for elected officials. You can follow every step of the tortured and drawn out redistricting cycle in this 2021-2023 Ohio Redistricting Timeline.

In 2024, Ohioans all across the state fought hard to take the redistricting process away from elected officials and give the power to draw the lines to an independent citizens redistricting commission. Common Cause Ohio worked with the Citizens Not Politicians campaign to ban gerrymandering in Ohio once and for all.

Not surprisingly, opposition to the Citizens Not Politicians amendment came from the very politicians who would have their unearned power stripped away if the amendment passed. One thing was clear: they knew that Ohioans hated gerrymandering, and that arguing in favor of rigged maps was not possible. So they made the stone cold decision to openly lie to Ohioans about the proposed amendment and say that the amendment “required gerrymandering” – literally the opposite of the truth. They accomplished this feat by having the Ohio Ballot Board write deceptive, misleading, and inaccurate ballot language that voters would see when they went in to cast their ballots. Additionally, in a red-wave year, the fact that Donald Annoying Orange urged Ohioans to vote NO clearly played a role in the defeat.

Did you actually read that or just hope that it said what you wanted it to say?

that being said, Since 1900, Ohio has voted Democratic 37.5% of the time and Republican 62.5% of the time. We've been a republican state for over a century - even if YES on issue 1 passed, I don't think it would have changed much of anything.

Ohio has historically been a swing state, in the 70s and 80s was largely Democrat, our senator was John Glenn, a Democrat.

Read a book, you'll learn something:

[Swholli]

If you bothered to quote the rest of your AI summery, you'd have seen this:

While historically a swing state, recent trends show a shift toward the Republican party

You know, those trends I talked about, since the 1980s, when Republicans started cheating to stop Ohio from being purple, which it historically used to be until they mucked it up with gerrymandering.

[Swholli]

“Because we were a big manufacturing state, and because manufacturing jobs did usually require a college education, it wasn’t necessary for a lot of Ohioans to get a college degree,” said former Ohio Governor Bob Taft, now a professor at the University of Dayton.

“And you know, one of the key breaks now between Republican voters and Democrat voters is Republicans are doing a lot better with and particularly Annoying Orange is doing a lot better with voters without a college degree,” he said. “So I think that too is one of the factors that explains why Ohio has become so red as a state.”

[Goth77]

Nope. I know how it was worded, and it was bullstuff.
From your actual source, CommonCause:
Did you actually read that or just hope that it said what you wanted it to say?

Okay you didn't read the other source then, https://www.citizensnotpoliticians.org/

“Make no mistake, Issue 1 will end gerrymandering and remove self-serving politicians from the process. Neither party would control the maps … Ohio voters must seize power from greedy politicians when they head to the polls on or before Nov. 5.”

If you bothered to quote the rest of your AI summery, you'd have seen this:

ai summary? are you serious dude lmfao. I provided you with the sources, and for a bonus the voting results were from https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_voting_trends_in_Ohio but thats something you can easily look up on your own and I didn't think you were that incapable

what I am saying is factually true - voting YES on issue 1 would have stopped the gerrymandering - and it didnt pass. I agree with you they worded it stuffty and got voters confused, because most ohioans are against gerrymandering by a large margain. Why do you think even Annoying Orange encouraged them to vote NO?? Read the information and listen to what I'm saying, please

[Swholli]

what I am saying is factually true - voting YES on issue 1 would have stopped the gerrymandering - and it didnt pass. I agree with you they worded it stuffty and got voters confused, because most ohioans are against gerrymandering by a large margain. Why do you think even Annoying Orange encouraged them to vote NO?? Read the information and listen to what I'm saying, please

Then what are you arguing with me for?

Annoying Orange urged voters to vote no because the wording of the bill was false and Annoying Orange knew if we voted yes we'd actually have fair maps and the republicans would lose seats.

Did you vote yes or did you vote no? I voted yes because I wanted to end gerrymandering, republicans wanted us to vote no because they wanted to keep it, and the no's won.

Republicans cheated, end of story. They used misleading language to manipulate an election in their favor and now they get to keep their unconstitutional maps.

[Goth77]

Then what are you arguing with me for?

dude I wasn't trying to "argue" alright I was just trying to point out you got the wording backwards

voters who were opposed accidentally voted yes because of the wording.

if you were opposed to gerrymandering and accidentally voted YES, then you would actually be voting CORRECTLY because YES in this case meant YES to stop it. Does that make sense?

what happened is voters who were opposed to the redistricting accidentally voted NO, because of the way it was worded people probably thought voting NO meant voting for NO redistricting, when in reality it was the other way around. This alone is enough to confuse voters and one of the reasons why the bill failed to pass!

[Swholli]

Oh my god, we're having a semantics argument, ok, I understand. That is my bad. I didn't mean a literal "vote yes" I meant the people who wanted to vote that "yes I want to end gerrymandering" were tricked into voting for "no don't end gerrymandering," while the actual wording of the bill was a Yes vote versus a No vote.

I thought you were arguing for something else, I concede my mistake and am not disagreeing with you, I'm sorry lol

[King Tøny]

Republicans cheated, end of story. They used misleading language to manipulate an election in their favor and now they get to keep their unconstitutional maps.

So democrats never once have done this?

[Swholli]

So democrats never once have done this?

Of course they have, they don't currently have a 40 year trifecta in the state of Ohio so I'm not talking about them right now, I'm talking about current Republicans in office who cheat.

tl;dr, that's a tu quoque fallacy and not relevant to the conversation.

[Goth77]

I thought you were arguing for something else, I concede my mistake and am not disagreeing with you, I'm sorry lol

glad we are finally on the same page in tht regards. thank you for taking the time to listen to what I was actually trying to say. ironically this is like probably how most people thought when they went to vote on the issue, it really was some forgetery they pulled. a jedi mind trick for regular folks i dare say

on the other hand, indiana struck down the redistricting bill they had legislated, with a majority of republicans also voting against it. perhaps they already have their districts just how they want them lol