Vladimir Kogan is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University.
Voters are considering the most dramatic change to Columbus city government in more than a century. Unfortunately, they will do so without a robust debate about the unavoidable trade-offs and unintended consequences.
As a result of a backroom political deal, the authors of two competing and mutually incompatible ballot measures – Issue 8 and Issue 9 – have promised not to campaign against each other, depriving voters of any meaningful information about the downsides of each proposal.
While there are important differences between these plans, both would change how the Columbus City Council is elected. Under the current system, in place for more than 110
years, all council members run citywide and are elected at large. Both Issue 8 and Issue 9 would require a shift to district elections, with the city carved up into geographic wards that each elect their own representative. Those ward seats would make up a majority of the council under Issue 9 – and all of it under Issue 8.
Columbus voters have previously considered similar proposals on three separate occasions, voting them down overwhelmingly. Most recently, in 2016,they rejected moving away from at-large elections by a massive 40-point margin.
Voters said no to this ideapreviously because a vigorous campaign explained the downsides of such a change. No similar campaign is taking place this time, and as a result, voters are being asked to make a consequential decision largely in the dark.
Yet they deserve to understand several key issues.
Columbus first adopted at-large elections a century ago because of a widespread belief that this system was a bulwark against party machines and the corruption that plagued many large cities at the time. A model city charter published by the National Municipal League in 1916 recommended at-large elections, and a leading textbook on American government from this era warned that “where the ward system prevails, the ward becomes the seat of a local political organization whose methods are so often corrupt and dishonorable that they constitute a great hindrance to good city government.”
Proponents of wards have similar complaints today, arguing that they are necessary to fix perceived corruption at City Hall and to break the Franklin County Democratic establishment’s stranglehold over city government. Yet they have not explained why their solution – literally the opposite of the one recommended by reformers for decades – would actually fix these problems.
In 2016, the primary backer of ward elections was the local Republican Party. Recognizing that Columbus had become a deep-blue city, Republicans knew their only hope of electing even a single Republican to City Council was combining the few remaining pockets of red in the city into a single geographic district. Today, wards are being sold as a progressive choice backed by local Democratic Socialists. Yet no one has explained what has changed over the past decade.
In 2017, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund threatened to sue Columbus, arguing that its system of at-large elections was diluting the power of Black voters. But recent elections have shown just the opposite.
In last year’s nail-biter race for District 7, Tiara Ross defeated Jesse Vogel largely on the strength of her support in the city’s Black precincts. Vogel voters were concentrated in the city’s whitest areas, explaining why he won his district but lost citywide.
While Vogel supporters view his defeat as evidence of a problem with the current system, it is also evidence that citywide elections empower the city’s Black voters and that moving to wards would significantly reduce their political influence.
Most worryingly, a growing body of empirical research from across the country shows that ward elections dramatically slow new housing construction, mostly by empowering wealthy homeowners and anti-development NIMBYs. Given our city’s housing affordability challenges, this is a real downside voters should take seriously.
With so much at stake, Columbus voters deserve a real debate about both the benefits and downsides of Issues 8 and 9. But it seems they won’t get one.
Vladimir Kogan is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Backroom deal is why there's no talk about seismic shift headed for Columbus elections | Opinion
