Every ten years, the census counts Ohioans where they live. For about 50,000 Ohioans living in state prisons, that means being counted as residents of the mostly rural areas where many Ohio prisons are located.
And that has political implications.
As cleveland.com's Rich Exner recently reported, nine of every ten Ohio prison inmates are housed in Republican congressional districts.
That works out well for the GOP, because, under current state law, Ohio felons serving time in prison may not vote. Politically speaking, they thus equate to thousands of "voteless" constituents who help GOP mapmakers top off the number of people required to create congressional and General Assembly districts. That, in turn, bolsters the clout of Ohio's Republican counties in Washington and Columbus.
How to solve this?
One obvious solution -- that also has the advantage of fairness and equity -- is to give incarcerated felons the right to vote. The second is to count their voting places as their hometowns, not their prison cells.
Ohio should do both.
Today, formerly incarcerated Ohioans can vote once they're released from prison. But up until that time, they're like a Zombie army of voteless pegs to be moved around on a gerrymandering board.
Is letting prisoners vote practical? Yes. Two states already do it -- Maine and Vermont.
In those states, prisoners, if they choose to vote, can cast absentee ballots in their home districts. It works. Ohio should follow suit.
Meanwhile, at least four other states -- while not letting incarcerated felons vote -- have passed laws requiring that, for redistricting purposes, state prisoners must be counted in their home residences, not their prisons.
According to a 2012 policy paper from the nonprofit public policy research organization Demos, Maryland and New York implemented their laws after the 2010 census, and both have withstood federal court challenges; Delaware and California's laws will take effect with the next census.
In four other states -- Virginia, Colorado, New Jersey and Mississippi -- the legislative or executive branches either "require or encourage local governments to modify the census and refuse to use prison populations as padding," Demos found.
Ohio needs to enact a law similar to Maryland's aptly titled "No Representation Without Population Act" -- on the obvious grounds that current law distorts the state's politics and weakens the clout of urban districts.
Here are the numbers that show why: Exner found that the four Ohio congressional districts held by Democrats house 8.7 percent of state inmates, while 91.3 percent of state inmates are incarcerated in the 12 GOP-held districts.
So while Ohio's six most populous counties (Cuyahoga, Franklin, Hamilton, Lucas, Montgomery and Summit) are the home counties for 49 percent of state inmates, only 1.5 percent of them count for census -- and redistricting -- purposes.
Today, Ohio is one of 15 states that allows full restoration of voting rights upon release from prison, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Why not keep those voting rights intact even while incarcerated?
For gerrymandering purposes, allowing head counts of voteless felons in prisons is doubly wrong, as shown by a Greater Cleveland example that Exner cites: The district of U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican from southwest Ohio, has been artfully redrawn to lasso into it 3,350 state prison inmates in Lorain County's Grafton.
Ohio should count prisoners where they live. Prison is nobody's "home." Making this change would more accurately represent the political makeup of districts across the state.
But that's not enough. The act of incarceration should not rob inmates of their constitutional right to vote.
Ohio already has recognized that convicted felons have the right to vote. The state should take it a step further, allowing them to vote while in prison -- thereby maintaining their connections to society as members of the communities they call home.
Ohio's current practices on felon voting rights while in prison and on prison redistricting are unjust and archaic - and must end.
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