July 1 – An Ohio political group delivered more than 731,000 petition signatures to the secretary of state on Monday, hoping it will be enough to get Ohioans to vote on district redistricting reform in November.
Signature verification by the state will follow. At least 413,487 of those signatures must be valid and 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties must be represented by at least 5% of registered voters to get on the ballot. The question would need a simple majority in November to be included in the state constitution.
“My goal is to make sure that representation is fair,” Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, told this news outlet Monday outside the Ohio Secretary of State’s office. “What we’ve learned in these decades of extreme gerrymandering in Ohio is that the only way that can happen is if politicians and lobbyists are taken out of the equation.”
The League of Women Voters is a high-profile backer of Citizens Not Politicians, the group behind the proposed constitutional amendment that would eliminate Ohio’s current redistricting process, which voters set in motion through separate rounds of constitutional amendments in 2015 and 2018. It would replace it with a 15-member Citizen Redistricting Commission.
The new commission, which proponents insist would be nonpartisan and separate from the interests of politicians, would consist of five Republicans, five Democrats and five independent registered voters. The panel would meet more often than the Ohio Redistricting Commission is required to and would be required to take more actions, such as actually drawing the map, in public — a significant distraction from the current process.
“These are not party officials, they are not people who have relationships with elected officials, they are not people whose family members work for elected officials,” said retired Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican who has become the face of the citizen-initiated amendment. “This is the cleanest system you can possibly have to have citizens, not politicians, draw these maps.”
If the system is adopted, the districts would be redrawn in 2025, after which a standard ten-year cycle would be used, similar to the US census.
The proposed amendment has drawn sharp criticism from Republican politicians who hold supermajorities in both the Ohio House of Representatives and Senate and hold all state executive branch positions, thereby controlling Ohio’s current mapping process.
At the same time, the plan has strong support from Democratic politicians, but they have little say in which maps are implemented.
Under the current system, the Ohio Constitution sets forth guidelines for how the maps of the state’s House of Representatives, Senate, and electoral districts are to be drawn. These maps are drawn largely behind closed doors and then voted on by a bipartisan, but often biased, committee of politicians on the Ohio Redistricting Commission.
One significant difference between the new proposal and the current system concerns how the commission is told to deal with sitting legislators. Under the current system, sitting legislators cannot be drawn into the same districts, which limits the flexibility of the commission in drawing the maps. Under the new proposal, the residences of sitting legislators are not considered, which could lead to sitting legislators being drawn out of their districts entirely.
Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima) told reporters Friday he was concerned the citizens’ redistricting commission was not sufficiently accountable.
“I think the people who make such an important decision should be elected officials who are accountable to the public, not unknown bureaucrats somewhere who have to play by the rules in a 32-page, single-spaced document,” Huffman said.
O’Connor pushed back against Huffman’s concerns about accountability on Monday, recalling the seven times the Ohio Redistricting Commission approved maps that her Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional. O’Connor sided with Democrats in the court’s rulings before federal courts forced the state to temporarily implement an unconstitutional map to administer the 2022 elections.
“As far as accountability, I don’t know where accountability is in the system that we have, quite frankly,” O’Connor said. “They weren’t accountable to the people, they weren’t accountable to the Supreme Court, and you know what happened.”
The new proposal has two primary guidelines.
—The first says that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the state legislature cannot be more or less than 3% of how the state normally votes. So if, for example, Ohioans vote Republican 55% of the time in a given lookback period, then the state’s maps could favor Republicans in only 52% to 58% of the districts.
—The second guideline states that maps should preserve “communities of interest” within the same legislative districts to the highest degree feasible. A community of interest can be anything from a township, city, or county to less obvious distinctions, such as areas that share similar “representation needs” based on race, socioeconomic status, neighborhood, and more. Communities of interest cannot be based on political affiliation.
These two new guidelines are not a huge departure from what the state is already working with and are unlikely to lead to a major swing in favor of Democrats anytime soon.
“That’s just the voter ratios, the way Ohio is structured right now. OK, so be it. Wherever the chips fall, that’s where they’re going to fall,” O’Connor said. “Let’s just have an independent, transparent, nonpartisan process to do it. That’s all we’re asking, and who’s afraid of that?”
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