YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Saving Our Democracy was the theme Monday of the Martin Luther King Jr. Planning Committee’s workshop, which focused on the ill effects of gerrymandering.
The holiday observance started Sunday with a worship service and program.
The Rev. Kenneth Simon, pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church and a planning committee member, called Monday the day of perspiration.
“Yesterday was celebration,” he said. “This is where we get to the meat of the matters that affect our communities dealing with the particular issues that we have on for today.”
Due to the weather, the event was conducted virtually with about 60 participants.
“Just to give a little quick background, the Martin Luther King Planning Committee in planning every workshop for each year, we try to deal with particular issues that we know that Dr. King would address in the communities where he did his works of ministry because of his fight for justice, equality, fairness, etc.,” Simon said.
This year there are threats to democracy including in education, women’s rights and voting rights, he said.
“Today’s subject that we’ll be dealing with is the issue of gerrymandering, which is part of the redistricting process,” Simon said. “The redistricting process is the good thing. The gerrymandering is the evil that people make out of redistricting …”
Kathleen Gaige of the League of Women Voters of Greater Youngstown and Youngstown native Attorney Percy Squire were the workshop speakers.
“Gerrymandering is the process of establishing voting districts so that the party with the power to establish the districts ends up with more power than what the overall electorate supports,” Gaige said.
And whichever party has had the upper hand at the time of redistricting has engaged in it, she said.
“They have expanded their power beyond the amount of support that they enjoyed from the overall electorate,” the LWV representative said.
Best practices indicate that districts be compact, not geographically spread out, she said. They should include communities of shared or complementary interests and existing political subdivisions, such as counties, cities and school districts, should not be split into more than one district, because it makes representation difficult.
But she pointed to the 6th Congressional District, which starts in Mahoning County and extends along the state’s eastern border to include Washington County.
“Now this district is 200 miles north to south, so it is clearly not compact,” Gaige said. “It’s made up of four different economic development regions. So the economic interests of the district are not complementary, and they’re not shared.”
Stark County is split between the 6th and 16th districts and Massillon also is sliced in half.
A measure on the November 2024 ballot called for a group of nonpoliticians to draw redistricting maps, but that failed at the ballot box.

Gaige said proponents are regrouping. She encouraged workshop attendees to go to FairDistrictsOhio.gov and sign up for email updates about the redistricting process.
Squire also urged people to attend the hearings on the process and to voice concerns. Those hearings will be held around the state.
He said his statements aren’t to advance a particular party.
“This is an issue about fairness … and it’s an issue about maintaining democracy,” Squire said.
His focus is in Mahoning and Trumbull counties and the “division of blocks of Black voters into separate districts so as to enhance the electoral outcomes of a particular candidate versus giving equal weight to the votes of the Black community,” he said.
Redrawing the federal legislative districts in Ohio is going to happen within the next few months, although dates haven’t been announced.
Squire expects the process to follow the path it has before, and that will force opponents to go to court.
Mahoning and Trumbull counties should be in the same congressional district, he said.
Squire pointed out that the state recently formed the Lake-to-River Economic Development district, which includes Mahoning, Ashtabula, Trumbull and Columbiana counties. That demonstrates that officials recognize that the economies of those counties are related, he said. A Lake-to-River Caucus also was formed in the state Legislature.
“So while they form these caucuses, when they are honest about the interest of the constituents in these two groups, they admit Mahoning and Trumbull County should be joined together,” Squire said. “But when they go to draw the legislative districts, they’re dividing these counties, which is totally illogical.”
Pictured at top: Attorney Percy Squire speaks during the virtual workshop.