Grace SpringerCanton Repository
It takes about three hours to drive Ohio's 6th Congressional District from top to bottom, and during that drive, you'll encounter areas with different economies and people with different cultures, a new report says.
At a press conference Friday, University of Cincinnati political science professor David Niven and League of Women Voters of Ohio Executive Director Jen Miller put a spotlight on what they say is a badly gerrymandered district.
They argued the way the district is drawn hurts voters.
"The slicing and dicing is designed to secure partisan outcomes," Miller said. "It is not designed to maximize quality representation."
The 6th Congressional District comprises parts of 11 counties: Belmont, Carroll, Columbiana, Harrison, Jefferson, Mahoning, Monroe, Noble, Stark, Tuscarawas and Washington.
Voters in the district will cast ballots in a special election Tuesday to decide who will represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives through the end of the year.
Perils of the 6th Congressional District
Niven said the size and diversity of the district make it difficult to represent.
"[We have districts to] create coherent and cohesive entities that can be represented," he said. "The 6th district is actually built on adversarial economic interests, it's built on an incongruent culture and it's built on divided geography."
Some portions of Stark County are in the 6th District, while the other portion of the county is in the 13th District.
Niven pointed to the city of Massillon, which is split between the two districts. The city also has a large minority voter population.
"Those lines were drawn to divide Massillon," Niven said. "I've done some research nationwide, that is a condition that is twice as likely to be imposed on minority communities."
The district has four different economic regions that are sometimes at odds on policy, Niven said.
In much of the district, including Carroll and Columbiana counties, manufacturing jobs dominate the economy, but fossil fuels are a large part of the economy in places like Belmont.
"If a member wanted to represent these interests, you'd have to do contradictory things," Niven said. "The energy industry has an interest in the profits of the energy industry. Manufacturing has the exact opposite interest in reducing use of fossil fuels. ... A member who was trying to honestly represent this district would have to be both for and against initiatives to reduce fossil fuels."
The large geographic size of the district also inhibits the ability of constituents to visit their district office, Niven said.
"It would be natural to think that the closest local office for a member of congress should be in your district," he said. "In gerrymandered states, for between a third and half of voters the closest congressional district office is in the wrong district."
He said for some people living in western edge of the 6th Congressional District in Navarre, there are seven congressional district offices that are geographically closer to their home than their local district office.
"You put these folks so much closer to the heart of other districts than to the heart of their own district, and that's how you get this effect," Niven said. "That is gerrymandering."
Districts across the state face similar problems
Niven said the district is not even the worst when looking across Ohio.
"It's not going to be in the Ohio hall of fame of gerrymandering, but in some ways that's more depressing," he said. "It's a normal Ohio district in these days and times."
Niven said the 1st Congressional District, which encompasses Warren County and part of Hamilton County, including the city of Cincinnati is a particularly bad one.
"It is really, really, really hard to come up with a rationale for pairing the city of Cincinnati with Warren County except wanting to punish the people of Cincinnati," he said. "If the point is coherence, you can do this easily, and you do it regionally."
Next week's special election will decide 6th Congressional District
Republican Michael Rulli and Democrat Michael Kripchak will be on the ballot Tuesday to represent 6th Congressional District.
The special election was called to fill a vacancy left by Republican Bill Johnson, who resigned earlier this year to become president of Youngstown State University. The winner will serve the remainder of Johnson's term, which runs through the end of the year.
The candidates will also face off in the November general election for a full two-year term.
Reach Grace at 330-580-8364 or gspringer@gannett.com. Follow her on X @GraceSpringer16.
