According to an Ohio voter advocacy coalition, 12 of 16 congressional districts on the new Ohio map favor Republicans, the other four Democrats. The Dems say that Ohio is about half red and half blue. But now something rather controversial has arisen, and guess who had their fingerprints all over it?

Via the Lancaster Eagle Gazette:

COLUMBUS — Public documents released Monday by Ohio voter advocates show representatives of U.S. House Speaker John Boehner and operatives at the National Republican Congressional Committee were central in drawing the state’s disputed congressional map.

Documents obtained through a public records request by the Ohio Campaign for Accountable Redistricting show Tom Whatman, executive director of a congressional campaign effort called Team Boehner, legislative leaders, mapmaking consultants and the National Republican Congressional Committee participating in the process.

The correspondence includes a pledge by GOP Senate President Tom Niehaus to deliver “a map that Speaker Boehner fully supports.” … Coalition representative Jim Slagle said there’s no question that the map was gerrymandered to favor a Republican majority. He said at a Monday news conference that there was no evidence in emails that the GOP was concerned about good-government mapmaking principles such as keeping counties whole or keeping like voters together.

“We have politicians choosing their voters instead of the other way around,” he said.

The claim is that Republicans in charge of drawing the map created districts “that will provide for largely predetermined elections where we will know which party will win before we even know who the candidates are,” and that even where Democrats won easily, they created districts “so that Republican candidates could safely win a solid majority of districts even in a heavily Democratic year.”

And all this was done in secret, even though transparency was promised.

Add this to voter suppression and all those corporate Citizens United kajillions of dollars, and you can see why many of us Democrats are just a tad concerned about the outcome of the 2012 elections, even if it were to look good for the president to pull off a win.