The League of Women Voters of Northern Portage County (LWVNPC), a small, hyperlocal voting rights and civic engagement group, operates at the edge of the Cleveland suburbs, where cul-de-sacs bleed into corn fields and asphalt turns to tar-and-chip. This intersection of rural and suburban life creates a challenging political dynamic in northern Portage County: wealthier enclaves clash with country communities, and polarization makes civil discourse difficult and rare. Here, school levies become bitter fights between rival parent groups and develop a Shakespearian tone. Township trustee races metamorphose into referendums on illegal immigration. Last month, the county Sheriff made headlines for suggesting that his Facebook followers “…write down all the addresses of the people who had her [Harris] signs in their yards!” Northern Portage County is fraught with tension—but LWVNPC is not content to settle for this status quo. 

While these political dynamics trouble communities across the country, LWVNPC believes that local-level action can best address the problem. Their Vice President and Co-Chair of Voter Services, Janice Simmons-Mortimer, cites the disappearance of reliable local news as a serious compounding factor of her community’s partisan division and the breakdown of local civil discourse. After the Record Courier and the Aurora Advocate were acquired by The USA TODAY Network, both publications were, in Simmons-Mortimer’s words, “gutted.” With skeleton staffs and outsider editorial direction, both the Advocate and the Courier can no longer provide essential coverage of local politics and news. The sudden media vacuum pushed their readership onto online forums, social media groups, and personal blogs to access local news, exacerbating partisan information isolation and breeding rampant mis- and disinformation. Alarmed by these developments and confident in their grassroots strategy, LWVNPC developed Democracy Dialogues: an event series that highlights important issues in policy, civic engagement, and democratic governance through face-to-face conversations between local experts and their fellow community members. They aim to educate the public on complex topics, provide a forum for civil discussion and disagreement, and encourage attendees to escape their political bubble.

The event has been a resounding success. For several years, LWVNPC has hosted a Democracy Dialogues event once every 3-5 months and has been pleased by the public turnout, the discourse, and the relationships they’ve seen form during the dialogues. Despite their successes, LWVNPC continued to watch distrust grow deeper and disinformation spread unchecked in their community. So with the 2024 general election shaping up to be extremely divisive up and down the ballot in Ohio, they’ve doubled down on their efforts. In total, they will host three Democracy Dialogues in the three months leading up to the election, with topics aimed at promoting positive civic engagement and preempting damaging partisan narratives about the election. Last week, I attended their second such event, which highlighted a statewide constitutional amendment addressing gerrymandering in Ohio. 

Gerrymandering has long been a bipartisan tool of antidemocratic politics in Ohio. Following the ebbs and flows of the Statehouse majority, Ohio districts have contorted to suit the party in charge. As early as the 1980s, under a Democratic majority, the League of Women Voters of Ohio voiced their opposition to the practice, citing its numerous harms to fair, democratic governance. Chief among these is an erosion of vertical accountability: elected officials in gerrymandered “safe seats” are not responsive to constituent preferences because they face no electoral challenge. Dissatisfied voters have no recourse. In addition, these “safe” districts often breed extremism and advance polarization in Ohio, as the seat is effectively won and lost in the primary process, where politicians cater to a hyper-engaged minority of their party and which produces hardliner candidates who run on increasingly radical policies. A reality where primaries elect representatives creates an arms race to the fringes, where Republican candidates in artificially-red districts can only get outflanked to their right, and Democrat candidates only to their left. While in office, representatives implement wildly unpopular policies that appeal to the small minority of constituents that will vote in their primary. Beyond stoking partisan polarization, this system disenfranchises moderate and independent voters, who have no say in their representation. Born of the constitutionally-mandated redistricting process and corrupted by insiders, gerrymandering is a cancer of democracy. And in Ohio, the body is fighting back. 

The Democracy Dialogues event opened with the LWVNPC president, April Secura—who sported a black “voters gonna VOTE” t-shirt as she shared some remarks from a notepad—welcoming attendees and presenting the topic and speaker for the evening. Secura, a longtime member and president of the group, emphasized both the League’s commitment to nonpartisanship and their decades-long campaign to end gerrymandering. As she introduced Sheri Rose, the Development Director at the League of Women Voters of Ohio and the president of the League of Women Voters of Kent, Secura impressed that their goal was to provide voters with “just the facts” on gerrymandering and Issue 1.

Rose began her presentation by describing the redistricting process: every 10 years, upon the release of the census, states must redraw their state and federal congressional districts in accordance with the new population distribution. In Ohio, the 2020 census and subsequent redistricting has been a shocking display of contempt for the law and corruption with impunity. The situation has deteriorated so far that for the 2024 election Ohio is using unconstitutional districts. Over a yearslong process, the Ohio Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the Republican-supplied redistricting maps, but, through a constitutional crisis orchestrated by Statehouse Republicans, the drawn out legal process left Ohio with no choice but to settle for unconstitutional, gerrymandered districts. Issue 1, Rose explained, is a constitutional amendment that creates a citizen-run Redistricting Commission—a panel of 5 democrats, 5 republicans, and 5 independents—that would produce district maps outside of the influence of politicians. It would allow for greater transparency and citizen input in the redistricting process, and aims to produce fair maps for Ohio, regardless of which party would win the Statehouse majority. This framework has been tested in other states, and, in Rose’s view, is Ohio’s best chance to curb gerrymandering once and for all.  

The most striking portion of the LWVNPC’s Democracy Dialogues event on gerrymandering was the moderated segment of audience questions. Attendees who wrote their questions and criticisms of the amendment throughout the presentation could hear Rose respond directly. In her closing, Rose stated that “at the very foundation, this is about democracy,” and her words echoed beyond the topic of the Dialogue. The civil interfacing of ideas is so difficult to orchestrate in this age of polarization and in a community dominated by two different partisan visions of the country—but with the League of Women Voters of Northern Portage County at the front lines of these challenges, our democracy has hope for a better tomorrow.