Ohio: Jennifer Brunner

The League of Women Voters of Ohio, working with Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and other
partners, are staging the "redistricting competition" to show there are viable ways to make
redistricting more objective and less partisan.

Plans will be evaluated based on scoring in four major areas: compactness and avoiding "bizarre"
shapes; "communities of interest," or keeping counties, cities and places with shared interests in
the same districts; competitiveness, meaning the district can be won by either party; and
"representational fairness" to avoid any bias favoring one political party.

The contest is being run through a Web site,
www.ohioredistricting.org. There is no cost to
participate.

The idea is to promote "a robust public conversation" about redistricting with the goal of
making recommendations to the state legislature for changes to the process.

-- Mark Niquette

mniquette@dispatch.com

President Obama's job approval has taken a dive in Ohio, a new poll released this morning shows.

"Not surprisingly, the honeymoon is over," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

"But the era of good feeling is still alive."

What that means is that the survey's new numbers for Obama 57 percent approval, 33 percent disapproval are still healthy, especially in a state Obama won by only 4 percentage points last fall, Brown said.

But it's quite a fall from the stratospheric numbers 67 percent approval, 16 percent disapproval in Quinnipiac's poll a couple of weeks after the president's inauguration.

"The huge numbers he had immediately after the inaugural are coming down to earth," Brown said.

The League of Women Voters of Ohio, working with Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and other partners, announced a "redistricting competition" yesterday to allow anyone to submit plans for how congressional districts should be redrawn.

The idea is to show there are viable ways of redistricting to create congressional districts that aren't gerrymandered with crazy contortions designed to benefit a political party.

Supporters hope the approach in the winning plan will be part of a ballot issue this fall or in the May primary next year. They hope to amend the state Constitution and change how Ohio redraws its district boundaries after the 2010 census.

"We believe this redistricting competition will show that our state can transition to a fair, open process for drawing legislative lines," said Linda D.

Ohio Lt. Governor Lee Fisher and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner tried to sell themselves to the influencial North Shore AFL-CIO Federation of Labor this morning.

The two Democrats met separately with the labor group's 29-member executive committee to outline their campaigns for the U.S. Senate. The candidates want the leaders to make an endorsement sooner rather than later.

The North Shore executive committee doesn't endorse directly. Instead, it makes a recommendation -- that must be ratified by its member delegates -- to the Ohio AFL-CIO, which makes the official endorsement.

Fisher and Brunner have both enjoyed union support and have been lining up endorsements of member unions, which are free to back a candidate now.