July 1 – An Ohio political group hand-delivered more than 731,000 petition signatures to the secretary of state’s doorstep on Monday, hoping it will be enough to allow Ohioans to vote on redistricting reform in November.
State signature verification is set to 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, in order to vote. The issue would need to receive a simple majority in November to be adopted into the state constitution.
“My goal is to make sure representation is fair,” Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, told this media outlet on Monday in front of the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office. “What we have learned from these decades of extreme gerrymandering in Ohio is that the only way this will happen is if politicians and lobbyists are taken out of the equation.”
The League of Women Voters is a notable supporter of Citizens Not Politicians, the group behind the proposed constitutional amendment that would eliminate Ohio’s current redistricting process – which was instituted by voters through several rounds of constitutional amendments in 2015 and 2018 – and would replace it with a 15-member Citizens Redistricting Commission.
The new commission, which supporters insist would be nonpartisan and disconnected from political interests, would be made up of five Republicans, five Democrats and five unaffiliated registered voters. The panel would meet more frequently than required by the Ohio Redistricting Commission and would be required to perform more actions, such as drawing the map itself, in public — a significant departure from the current process.
“They’re not party members, they’re not people who associate with elected officials, they’re not people whose family members work for elected officials,” said retired Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican who became the face of the change initiated by citizens. “This is the purest possible system for citizens, not politicians, to draw up these maps.”
The system would go into effect with a redistricting process in 2025, if approved, before moving to a 10-year cycle that matches the U.S. Census.
The proposed amendment has received withering criticism from Republican politicians who control supermajorities in both the Ohio House and Senate and hold all state executive branch positions and therefore control Ohio’s current map-making process.
At the same time, it attracted considerable support from Democratic politicians who had little say in which maps would be implemented.
Under the current system, the Ohio Constitution contains guidelines for how maps of the U.S. House, Senate, and congressional districts should be drawn, and then those maps are drawn largely behind closed doors and voted on by a bipartisan panel, but often unbalanced. of politicians on the Ohio Redistricting Commission.
A considerable difference between the new proposal and the current system involves how the committee is instructed to deal with sitting legislators. Under the current system, sitting legislators cannot be drawn into the same districts, which restricts the commission’s flexibility in drawing up maps. Under the new proposal, the hometowns of sitting legislators will not be considered, which could result in sitting legislators being removed from their districts entirely.
Senate President Matt Huffman, R-Lima, told reporters Friday that he feared the citizens redistricting commission would not be held accountable.
“I think the people making an important decision like this should be elected officials who are accountable to the public, not unknown bureaucrats somewhere and subject to whatever rules (are in) a 32-page single-spaced document,” Huffman said .
O’Connor responded to Huffman’s concerns about accountability on Monday, recalling the seven times the Ohio Redistricting Commission approved maps that its Supreme Court found unconstitutional. O’Connor sided with caucus Democrats in court rulings before federal courts forced the state to temporarily implement an unconstitutional map to hold the 2022 election.
“As far as accountability, I don’t know where the accountability is right now in the system that we have, frankly,” O’Connor said. “They were unaccountable to the citizens, they were unaccountable to the Supreme Court, and you know what happened.”
The new proposal has two main 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 Ohioans voted Republican 55% of the time in a given lookback period, for example, the state’s maps might only favor Republicans in 52% to 58% of districts.
—The second guideline says maps should preserve “communities of interest” within the same legislative districts to the highest possible level. A community of interest can be anything from a municipality, city or county to less obvious distinctions such as areas that share similar “representative needs” based on race, socioeconomic status, environment and more. Communities of interest cannot be based on political affiliations.
These two new guidelines are not major departures from what the state is already working with, and as such, they would likely not create a major shift in favor of the Democrats anytime soon.
“That’s just the voter ratio, the way Ohio is built right now. Okay, so be it. Wherever the chips fall, that’s where they fall,” O’Connor said. “Let’s just have an independent, transparent, nonpartisan process to achieve this. That’s all we ask, and who can be afraid of that?”
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Avery Kreemer can be reached at 614-981-1422, at X, by email, or you can leave him a comment/tip with the search below.
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