Campaign workers with the Citizens Not Politicians redistricting amendment unload boxes of petitions at a loading dock July 1, 2024, for the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office in Columbus.
Tribune News Service
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Voters will decide in November whether to overhaul Ohio’s system of drawing political district maps after state officials said Tuesday the campaign had collected enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Citizens Not Politicians, the campaign group backing the amendment, needed to get 413,487 signatures, including a minimum number from 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties. Secretary of State Frank LaRose said Tuesday the group had exceeded that goal, turning in 535,005 signatures while exceeding the minimum requirement in 58 counties. The campaign submitted more than 731,000 signatures, giving it a validity rate of about 73%.
Elections officials have been checking signatures for weeks, after Citizens Not Politicians submitted them at the beginning of this month, just ahead of a state deadline. The campaign backing the amendment appears to be sophisticated and well-funded, which bodes well for the measure’s chances at passing in November.
The amendment will be the only statewide issue on the November ballot.
If approved, the measure could usher in sweeping political changes in Ohio by reducing the power majority Republicans have had for decades to draw their own political district lines. Supporters of the amendment have described it as a way to take self-interested politicians out of the process, and say it will produce more competitive districts that will make elected officials more responsive to and representative of average voters.
“This certification is a historic step towards restoring fairness in Ohio’s electoral process,” retired Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican leader of the campaign backing the amendment, said in a prepared statement. “With this amendment on the ballot, Ohioans have the chance to reclaim their power from the self-serving politicians who want to stay in power long past their expiration date while ignoring the needs of the voters.”
A statement from John Fortney, a spokesperson for Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican who’s a leading opponent of the measure, said the amendment campaign should be called “political outcomes over people.”
“It is designed to gerrymander guaranteed political wins for the progressive left with no accountability to the more than 70% of voters who approved the current system that produced a unanimous bipartisan set of maps for the General Assembly,” Fortney said.
Ohioans last changed the state’s redistricting system in 2015 and 2018. Those reforms were designed to prevent gerrymandering by limiting how counties can be split and to promote bipartisanship by requiring Democratic support for the districts to last for the typical 10 years. They also included design criteria that directed the redistricting commission to consider factors like partisan balance when designing the maps.
But the system failed the first time it was used in 2021, with the Ohio Supreme Court rejecting Republican-drawn maps seven times in a series of 4-3 decisions while citing the new voter-approved criteria. The maps were used anyway, after Republicans won a series of court rulings, although the legal battle resulted in Ohio postponing state legislative elections in 2022.
The product of those maps has been an overwhelming Republican supermajority in the Ohio General Assembly and a 10-5 advantage for the GOP in Ohio’s congressional delegation. In comparison, Republicans have gotten an average of 56% of the vote over the past decade’s worth of elections.
Control of the Ohio Supreme Court has shifted following the 2022 elections, after O’Connor, a swing vote in the redistricting rulings, retired due to judicial age limits.
Ohio is still using the congressional maps drawn under the current redistricting system. But the current state legislative district maps have changed slightly, and got unanimous, bipartisan support least year in a September 2023 vote that Democrats described as a calculated political decision.
Republicans, who currently control the state redistricting process and many of whom oppose the redistricting amendment, say the September 2023 vote shows the process has worked as intended.
What would the redistricting amendment do?
Citizens Not Politicians’ amendment would replace the Ohio Redistricting Commission, a panel of seven elected officials that’s currently controlled by Republicans, with a 15-member citizen’s panel made up of equal parts Republicans, Democrats and political independents. Politicos, including elected officials, party operatives and lobbyists, and their immediate family members, would be barred from serving on the new commission.
The commission would have to conduct its map drawing in public, and would draw its first congressional and state legislative district maps for use in the 2026 elections. The 17-page amendment lays out a bipartisan process to screen and select redistricting commission members. It also describes requirements the maps must meet, including requiring that the district lines favor each party to win seats in proportions that “closely correspond” to the preferences of voters, as measured by the results of the previous six years’ worth of statewide partisan general elections.
It lays out other factors for the commission to consider, including giving racial, ethnic and language minorities a chance to elect their candidates of choice and preserving communities of interest. It describes factors the citizen’s commission would consider, like a demonstrated history of broadly shared interests and representational needs, when deciding which townships, cities, counties or school districts would be kept intact in a single district.
This would be a change from the current Ohio Redistricting Commission, which is composed of the governor, secretary of state, state auditor and four state legislative leaders, including the minority leaders in the state House and Senate. The current redistricting commission has more strict rules about splitting cities and counties, and while it has similar language describing political proportionality, Republicans have argued the existing proportionality requirements are optional.
The current system has produced historic supermajorities for Republicans in the Ohio Statehouse and a massive advantage in the state’s congressional delegation, even though Republicans won about 56% of the vote between 2014 and 2022, according to court records.
Prominent supporters include the Ohio Democratic Party and labor unions, although the campaign describes itself as bipartisan, and O’Connor holds a prominent position with the group.
There is not yet any formal opposition campaign. But many top state Republicans, led by Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman, have spoken against the amendment, saying it would permit gerrymandering in favor of Democrats. And state records show a prominent Republican political firm founded a campaign PAC in October called Ohioans for Fair Districts — the same name used by a redistricting reform campaign a decade ago tied to the Democratic Party — although the PAC suspended operations last month without accepting any contributions or spending any money.
What are the next steps?
The next step is for the Ohio Ballot Board, a panel chaired by LaRose and controlled by Republicans, to write ballot language. The ballot board must meet no later than 75 days before the Nov. 5 election, which falls this year around Aug. 22.
State officials also will develop official arguments for and against the amendment, written by supporters and opponents, that will be published and available for voters to read.
“We are confident that Ohio voters will see simple, accurate language when they go to the polls on Nov. 5 to vote for this amendment,” O’Connor said in a prepared statement.
