Ohio voters will once again weigh in on redistricting reform

The last time Ohio voters changed the way new districts were supposed to be drawn for state legislative seats, the Republican officials in charge of the process ignored the reforms they’d approved.

In fact, GOP officials in 2022 disobeyed five orders from the state Supreme Court to produce fair maps as mandated by voters in 2015. Instead, two federal judges appointed by President Donald Trump ordered election officials to use maps that the Ohio Supreme Court had already struck down for too heavily favoring Republican candidates.

That brazen power play outraged the good government groups that had struck the deal with politicians in 2015 to ensure fairer, more competitive elections for statehouse seats. Now, those activists are pushing a new process for drawing legislative districts, one that leaves politicians out completely.

“We had to take politicians out of the process. They had a chance. They couldn’t resist gerrymandering,” said Mia Lewis, the associate director of Common Cause Ohio, one of the groups supporting a constitutional amendment on the ballot this November. “When a drunk driver says they’re not going to do it again, and they do it again, what do you do? You take the keys away. Issue 1 is a way to take the keys away from the politicians.”

The proposed amendment would set up a 15-member citizen commission made up of Democrats, Republicans and independents. If voters approve Issue 1, Ohio would take a similar approach to several other states that have switched to citizen-led redistricting processes in recent years, joining Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan.

Kareem Crayton, the vice president of the Washington, D.C., office of the Brennan Center for Justice, a group that supports redistricting reforms, said the proposal before Ohio voters would alleviate some of the biggest problems that come along with partisan gerrymandering. Skewed maps drive down voter turnout and prevent the public from getting engaged in government. 

“What that means is that one party is driving the action, and they’re unchecked,” Crayton said. “It gives rise to a lot of bad decision-making and sometimes corruption, and Ohio is certainly no stranger to that.” (A former Ohio House speaker is currently serving a prison sentence for accepting bribes from an electric company.)

Lewis said an outsized partisan advantage can also contribute to polarization in the public.

“Because the districts are drawn to have predictable outcomes, you have unaccountable politicians. They know they’re going to get elected. They don’t care. They’re not responsive to voters,” she said. “And if you know who’s going to win in November, the only election that matters is the primary. The way you win a primary is by being more extreme and appealing to your very small base. … You end up getting extremist politicians who don’t know how to compromise, they don’t know how to negotiate, they’re not there to solve problems.”

Fierce Republican Opposition

Not surprisingly, Ohio’s top Republicans are fighting against the ballot measure, often using similar language as the amendment’s supporters.

“If this amendment were to be adopted, Ohio would actually end up with a system that mandates—that compels—map drawers to produce gerrymandered districts,” said Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine in July. “In fact, Ohio would have gerrymandering in the extreme.”

The part of the amendment that DeWine objected to in his July comments would require the overall partisan lean of the legislative districts to “correspond closely to the statewide partisan preferences of the voters of Ohio,” a concept known as “proportionality.”

Those partisan preferences would be determined by averaging six years’ worth of statewide election results. While DeWine cruised to reelection in 2022 with a 62-37 win, other contests were much closer. JD Vance won his Senate seat with a 53-47 split. Three Republican candidates for the state Supreme Court—including DeWine’s son—all won with 56% of the vote.

In the Ohio House of Representatives, though, there are currently 67 Republicans and 32 Democrats. The GOP advantage is even more lopsided in the state Senate, where Republicans hold 26 seats and Democrats have seven. That means Democrats have 21% of the seats in the Ohio Senate.

In 2021, DeWine was part of a seven-member commission that was supposed to produce politically competitive maps under the current constitution. But the commission repeatedly passed maps that did not adhere to that requirement, according to the state high court. Instead, their maps gave an outsized advantage to Republicans.

When it comes to the current proposal, the Republican governor argued that considering past voting data “will lead to a predetermined partisan outcome.”

“Maps should be drawn based on population, with no consideration of past partisan voting patterns,” he said.

DeWine also questioned parts of the proposed amendment that specify that proportionality should be one of the overriding concerns for future mapmakers. The amendment says the maps must comply with the U.S. Constitution and federal civil rights laws. But proportionality would be higher on the list of considerations than anything else, DeWine said, including maintaining equal population and keeping communities of interest together.

“Now, the idea of proportionality sounds fair,” DeWine said, “however, we have seen how requiring the map drawer to draw districts—each of which favors one political party, with each district having a predetermined partisan advantage and requiring a certain number of districts to favor each party—obliterates all other good government objectives.”

But while the governor argues that partisanship should be removed from the process, a group working to defeat the measure is trying to tie it to Democrats. Ohio Works launched an ad in late September linking the redistricting proposal to national Republican talking points.

“Democrats will do anything to win,” a narrator said, as grainy footage of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plays. “Changing the rules, mail-in ballots, cheating and opening our borders just to win elections. Now in Ohio, they’re working to change our constitution with Issue 1. Democrats want to undo the redistricting safeguards that were supported by over 70% of Ohioans, all to rig the system. This isn’t democracy, it’s deception. Protect Ohio’s voice. Vote no on Issue 1.”

A group promoting Issue 1, known as Citizens Not Politicians, is on the airwaves, too. One spot rips former University of Michigan head football coach Jim Harbaugh for cheating, and says politicians drawing districts to protect themselves amount to the same thing.

A recent poll by Bowling Green State University released last week showed that 60% of respondents planned to vote “yes” for Issue 1, while 20% said they would vote “no” and 20% were unsure. The percentage of Democrats favoring the measure was twice as high as that of Republicans (82% compared to 41%), while 57% of independents favored the plan.

Melissa Miller, a Bowling Green political science professor, pointed out that voters heavily favored the 2015 and 2018 measures to reduce gerrymandering. The polling suggests “we’re headed for a similar result in 2024,” she said.

A Compromise Falls Apart

The redistricting measure voters approved in 2015 made a fundamental change to how the state draws legislative districts. They overwhelmingly supported an amendment that put a group of seven elected officials in charge of redistricting. Both Democrats and Republicans were guaranteed at least two of those seats.

The scheme gave the commission members reason to compromise. If the majority adopted a plan without members of the minority party, their maps would only take effect for four years. But if the minority party was on board, the maps would be in place for a decade.

By the time the next round of redistricting took place in 2021, though, Republicans were in no mood to compromise. The GOP majority passed maps that preserved their dominance in the legislature.

In a series of decisions over the first half of 2022, a four-justice majority of the Ohio Supreme Court repeatedly struck down GOP maps passed by the commission. The majority found that the commission made no attempt to pass a map that did not favor either political party, a requirement in the 2015 amendment. That compromise amendment, though, did not give the Ohio Supreme Court the power to pick a map on its own, as state high courts often do in redistricting disputes.

One of the most outspoken members of the court was Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican who suggested in a concurrence early on that Ohioans might want to consider amending the constitution again to take politics out of redistricting. O’Connor stepped down from the court after hitting the mandatory retirement age, and she is now one of the most visible proponents of the new redistricting measure.

With the 2022 elections approaching, Republicans turned to the federal courts to break the impasse between the state high court and the commission. The majority of a three-judge panel assigned to handle the case picked one of the existing Republican-drawn maps and put it into place.

The 2022 election led to a bigger Republican majority on the Ohio Supreme Court, and one that presumably was more likely to back the GOP redistricting plans. So the Democrats on the redistricting panel cut their losses and agreed to a Republican-drawn map for the rest of the decade.

If voters approve the new amendment in November, though, all existing legislative and congressional districts would be “void for any subsequent election.” The new commission would draw districts in 2025.

Trying to Remove Politics—and Politicians

Crayton from the Brennan Center said states like Ohio are wrestling with the influence of politics on redistricting because the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to stop blatant gerrymandering.

In 2019, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision in a North Carolina case, Rucho v. Common Cause, that held that even if partisan gerrymandering was “incompatible with democratic principles,” federal courts did not have jurisdiction to hear those kinds of challenges.

Meanwhile, several states have introduced processes that try to take control of redistricting out of the hands of politicians. Arizona voters approved an “independent” commission in 2000, followed by California in 2008, and both Colorado and Michigan in 2018. (Many states use special commissions so that legislators don’t have to vote on their own districts, but most of those commissions include government or political leaders.)

Crayton said the Ohio proposal would move the state close to the “gold standard” of redistricting processes by explicitly removing politicians from the actual line-drawing and giving it to a group that includes independents or people who have no particular political persuasion.

“If there’s transparency in the process, if there are steps taken that keep out the influence of politicians and, frankly, if there are directives that ensure the members of the commission reach consensus from getting this input and don’t fall into the same trap that legislatures do in picking a side come hell or high water,” he said, “then you end up getting a product that is more representative and generally gets a greater of level of confidence of the public.”