Will Youngstown, Ohio avoid prison gerrymandering?
by Leah Sakala
The voters in Youngtown, Ohio recently decided that it's time to redraw the city council ward boundaries for the first time in 30 years. But now the council members must choose: will they allow the new lines be skewed by the Census Bureau's prison count?
As David Skolnick explained in his recent column in The Vindicator,
The census considers prisoners to be residents of where they are incarcerated, even though except for some at the county jail, none of them can vote, and members of council don’t really represent them...
When officials with the Prison Policy Initiative read in The Vindicator about Youngstown City Council redistricting the seven wards to make each more equitable, they pointed out that counting inmates doesn’t really balance the populations in the wards.
Electoral districts are supposed to have about the same number of residents in them in order to comply with the Supreme Court's "one person, one vote" requirement that every vote weigh the same.
The problem is that the 2010 Census counted more than 3,000 people in the prisons and jail that are located within Youngstown city limits. If the city councilors decide to draw new wards based on the data as-is, they could end up drawing a district where more than a quarter of the "population" is made up of non-voting incarcerated people who aren’t even local residents. This would mean that three people who live near the biggest prison would have more say in local government than four people who live anywhere else.
The solution is simple and common: remove the incarcerated population from the redistricting data used to draw the new wards.
Mr. Skolnick says that our concern "merits serious discussion." But will the Youngstown city council heed our advice and join the 220+ other local governments that refuse to let the Census Bureau's prison count skew local democracy? Stay tuned.
To learn more, check out:
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Are prisoners Youngstown residents?, by David Skolnick, The Vindicator, August 16, 2013
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An organization urges city council to not count inmates when redistricting, by David Skolnick, The Vindicator, August 13, 2013
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Exclude prison populations when redistricting city wards, by Leah Sakala, The Vindicator, August 11, 2103
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