As deadline for reform measure nears, advocates look to future of Ohio redistricting

The members of the Ohio Redistricting Commission are sworn in by Gov. Mike DeWine on Wednesday. Left to right: State Rep. Jeff LaRe, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, Auditor of State Keith FSUSAN TEBBENaber, DeWine, Senate Majority Floor Leader Rob McColley, House Minority Leader Allison Russo and Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio. (Photo by Susan Tebben, OCJ.)

BY: SUSAN TEBBEN – Ohio Capital Journal

Signature collection continues for an anti-gerrymandering ballot measure in Ohio that would replace politicians on the redistricting commission with citizens. As the July deadline approaches, supporters are pointing to a new study showing how uncompetitive Statehouse races are.

The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU’s law school analyzed Ohio’s current maps alongside the results of the most recent primary election.

Authors of the study said the data “reveals one of the tangible ways Ohio’s gerrymandered maps undermine electoral competition, and how the districts leave millions of Ohio voters without a significant voice in the Ohio House elections slated for this November.”

“An overwhelming majority of Ohioans will cast ballots this November in legislative districts that were drawn to lock in general election outcomes, and few districts featured meaningful primary contests,” the Brennan Center report stated. “These are the predictable consequences of living in a gerrymandered state.”

One of the authors of the report, released Tuesday, is Yurij Rudensky, who spoke in support of the new ballot initiative proposed to hit voters in November. If it gets on the ballot and is passed by voters, the reforms would replace the current Ohio Redistricting Commission made up of elected officials with a citizen-run, judge-vetted commission to draw the next Statehouse and U.S. Congressional maps.

Rudensky spoke in a March panel, alongside former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor and others, about the difference between the reforms passed in 2015 and 2018 and the proposed amendment that voters may see on their general election ballots.

At the March panel discussion, Rudensky hesitated to call the last two measures reforms because he argued no changes were made and the previous amendments merely demonstrated that “political insiders have no business being in the process.”

Since those amendments passed — reforms made through legislative negotiation before hitting the voters — the Ohio Redistricting Commission has been built on a Republican majority, with Gov. Mike DeWine, Senate President Matt Huffman, former House Speaker Bob Cupp, Secretary of State Frank LaRose and Auditor of State Keith Faber all standing on the commission during some or all of the proceedings over the two years it took for the group to pass six Statehouse maps and two congressional maps. State Rep. Jeff LaRe, R-Violet Twp., replaced Cupp and state Sen. Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, came in for Huffman toward the end of the two-year span.

The Statehouse maps were declared unconstitutionally gerrymandered five times by a bipartisan majority on the Ohio Supreme Court, but voters were forced by federal judges to use them for the 2022 Election.

Statehouse maps passed by the redistricting commission this past September, and set to be used for this year’s election, were the only to receive bipartisan agreement (with Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio and House Minority Leader Allison Russo’s votes), while the state’s Congressional map is still considered unconstitutional under an Ohio Supreme Court ruling.

In analyzing the current Ohio Statehouse maps, Rudensky and co-author Gina Feliz concluded that about 77% of the state’s population live in “districts where elections for state representatives are not in serious dispute.”

“That is, these districts are either uncontested, or they give one party a disproportionate advantage in the general election so that the district is uncompetitive, even if it’s formally contested,” the researchers wrote.

The report defines “uncompetitive” as districts where the partisan draw favors one party by 55% or more.

Nearly half of the districts in the Ohio House didn’t have a primary contest in March to drive a November general election race, the Brennan Center research found, citing data from the Ohio Secretary of State.

“In all, there are 15 districts (out of 99 total) that will give voters no choice between Democratic and Republican candidates for state representative,” according to the study.

The report also recognized the low turnout in the state during the primary season, with an average of 18.8% of registered voters casting ballots in districts with competitive primaries.

Because of that, Rudensky and Feliz counted fewer than 450,000 voters who “all but decided who would serve as state representatives on behalf of more than 2.3 million registered voters and 3.5 million constituents.”

The report pointed to the proposed ballot initiative led by Citizens Not Politicians as a redistricting reform that could “center community needs and voter preferences rather than the interests of incumbents.”

Looking to a future that may have an independent redistricting commission, the voting rights group Common Cause put out its own report, a summary of a 2023 conference where members reflected on states who already have such a system in place, and those like Ohio that could see the change come in November.

“Unsurprisingly, all those who attended the conference believed in the possibilities of fair and representative maps and that independent redistricting commissions were the best strategy to achieve this goal,” Common Cause stated in the new report.

The “Roadmap for Fair Maps in 2030,” a summary of the 2023 National Citizen Redistricting Commissioners Conference, talked about the need to make redistricting a transparent process that is “responsive to community needs.” At the conference, the report said a “model commission” was organized for Ohio and neighbor state Indiana “to demonstrate how an alternative process based on community input and transparency can work.”

In a previous report, released shortly after the Ohio Redistricting Commission adopted the current Statehouse district maps, Common Cause gave the state a failing grade, calling the current map-drawing process and the results that came from it “unmitigated disasters.”

Ideally in redistricting, Common Cause members said the process should “ensure that commissions reflect the diversity of the jurisdiction” and engage community-based organizations and leaders to build resident trust and hold commissions accountable.

What should not be included in the process, according to the report, are legislature-appointed commissioners or any legislative role in the mapping process.

“Commission decisions on maps should be final, except for judicial review, with no approval from elected officials required,” the report stated.

The Citizens Not Politicians initiative was supported in the report as part of strategies to “increase fair representation in 2030,” the next time the process is set to start, though maps in Ohio would need to be redrawn in 2025 if the ballot measure passes in November.

Opposition to the initiative has been led by Huffman, who helped formulate the previous redistricting reforms. In an Ohio Chamber of Commerce event following the March primaries, he laid out his arguments against the initiative, saying litigation would pile up with the proposed system, and that “when allowed to work,” the current system did its job.

In order for the measure to appear on Ohio ballots in the general election, supporters must collect 413,487 valid state voter signatures by July 3.