Ohio voters will face a constitutional amendment this fall to change how congressional and legislative districts are drawn. The amendment would create a complicated system through which judges selected by lot appoint members of a commission who would in turn decide what the districts would look like.
While much is made of creating districts that are "competitive" and "fair" (which, to supporters, means districts where the results of recent elections were close among top-of-the-ticket major-party candidates, and where the districts that lean towards one major political party are balanced by a similar number of districts leaning to the other), far less importance is placed on creating districts that are compact (which is mentioned as a goal, but a less important one).
Compactness, however, should be the primary criterion for drawing districts. Voters inherently view those districts that are the most compact as those that are the most fair, because creating "competitive" districts requires binding distant communities that are dissimilar from each other. And the other great thing about compactness is that it is easily definable mathematically.
So the far simpler solution to redistricting reform is merely to require districts to conform to a mathematical model of compactness. It then won't matter who draws the districts, and the overwhelming majority of residents of those districts will have greater satisfaction that their representatives are truly representative of their community.
