Ohio’s Anti-Gerrymandering Ballot Measure Fails

An Ohio ballot measure to reform the state’s redistricting process with a constitutional amendment failed, meaning the power to draw congressional and state legislative districts will remain in the hands of politicians. The vote marked a disappointing loss for anti-gerrymandering reformers in a key state.

The ballot measure, known as Issue 1, proposed a state constitutional amendment to replace Ohio’s current map-drawing body, the Republican-dominated Ohio Redistricting Commission, with one to be called the Ohio Citizens Redistricting Commission. The new body would be made up of 15 members: Five Democrats, five Republicans and five independent citizens.

The push to change Ohio’s redistricting process gained steam in recent years after the current map-drawing body repeatedly drew district lines that violated the Ohio Constitution by disproportionately favoring Republicans, and the commission repeatedly ignored Ohio Supreme Court orders to draw fairer maps.

The standoff between the state’s Supreme Court and the Republican-dominated commission resulted in a constitutional crisis in 2022, when the court had no mechanism to enforce the constitution and multiple elections took place with districts that disproportionately benefited Republicans. The 2022 elections brought in a more conservative Supreme Court that ruled in favor of the commission’s maps. State Republicans had successfully run out the clock.

The current body is made up of four members appointed by majority and minority leaders in the state legislature. Three more slots are occupied by the governor, state auditor and secretary of state, currently all Republicans.

Crucially, the proposed “citizens” commission amendment called for a screening panel of retired judges and an extensive vetting process, interviews and a random drawing to slowly narrow down and ultimately select members of the new commission. They would be required to have the skill necessary to draw districts and be free of any relationship or substantive communication with the political process. As a result, current and former politicians, party officials and lobbyists would have been banned.

Republicans opposed the ballot measure, which stated that in order to create fair redistricting plans, “the statewide proportion of districts in each redistricting plan that favors each political party shall correspond closely to the statewide partisan preferences of the voters of Ohio.” This principle of “proportionality” is already laid outin the Ohio Constitution thanks to previous ballot measures.

But Republicans on the current commission used absurd reasoning to circumvent it, saying, for example, that because Republican candidates had won 13 times in the last 16 statewide elections, the “statewide proportion of voters favoring statewide Republican candidates” was therefore as high as 81% ― rather than 54%, the average Republican vote total in those elections.

Gov. Mike DeWine (R), a member of the current commission, announced his opposition to the ballot measure in July, saying its proportionality mandate “obliterates all other good government objectives.”

And Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a commission member who also opposed the ballot measure, leads the Ohio Ballot Board, which is charged with creating ballot measure summaries that appear on voters’ ballots. The summary for Issue 1 stated that it “required” the new commission “to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio.” Bolts magazine, a digital political publication, noted that when a Republican state senator, Theresa Gavarone, first proposed describing the anti-gerrymandering ballot measure with the term “required to gerrymander” during a meeting of the Ballot Board, audible gasps echoed through the meeting hall.

Supporters of the ballot measure sued over that summary, saying it was misleading, but the Republican-controlled Ohio Supreme Court mostly kept the Ballot Board’s summary. One Democratic dissenter on the court called it “perhaps the most stunningly stilted ballot language that Ohio voters will have ever seen.”

The language was in fact misleading: The Statehouse News Bureau spoke to one voter who supported redistricting reform but voted no on the measure after reading her ballot. “It leads you to believe it’s causing more gerrymandering,” the voter, Kelly Vogt, said. Bolts magazine spoke to another voter, Songgu Kwon, who mistakenly voted no. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes,’ you’re for gerrymandering,” Kwon said

The former chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court, Republican Maureen O’Connor, was a driving force behind the redistricting reform movement, even cutting an ad in support of the reform in which she highlighted her role on the court in voting in favor of striking down unconstitutional Republican maps ― and accused politicians of having “lied” about the ballot measure.

“That’s the whole problem with gerrymandering .... Who’s being represented? And how did they secure that representation?” O’Connor told HuffPost last year. The real question, she added, “is not how the voters secure that representation, but how the politicians secure the voters.”

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