Morning Briefing | What's happening in redistricting efforts

Voting districts and gerrymandering in Ohio combine to be one of many issues that is disputed along political party lines. Efforts for reform seem to be headed for the ballot this November.

We’re devoting our entire Morning Briefing newsletter today to the topic of the redistricting reform because it has been controversial and sometimes complicated.

Under the current system, the Ohio Constitution contains guidelines for how the state’s House, Senate and U.S. Congressional district maps should be drawn. Then those maps are drawn largely behind closed doors and voted on by a bipartisan — but often lopsided — panel of politicians on the Ohio Redistricting Commission.

One group, Citizens Not Politicians, hopes to change the way Ohio draws its districts through a citizen-initiated amendment aimed for the November 2024 ballot. The amendment would create a citizen redistricting commission, which would take elected officials out of the redistricting process altogether.

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The newsletter should take about 3 minutes, 58 seconds to read.

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Credit: Avery Kreemer

The latest

• Petitions: The Citizens Not Politicians initiative hand-delivered more than 731,000 petition signatures to the Secretary of State last week with the hope that it’s enough to allow Ohioans to vote on redistricting reform this November.

• Proposed constitutional amendment: The proposed amendment would scrap Ohio’s current redistricting process — which was instituted by voters through various rounds of constitutional amendments in 2015 and 2018 — and replace it with a 15-member Citizen Redistricting Commission.

• Signature verification: The state now needs to verify the signatures. At least 413,487 of those signatures need to be valid, and 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties need to be represented by at least 5% of their registered voters, in order to get on the ballot.

Where did we begin?

• Unconstitutional maps: The Ohio Redistricting Commission has passed maps that the Ohio Supreme Court judged to be unconstitutional seven times, including five times for state maps and twice for congressional maps.

• 2022 general election: The congressional map, despite the court’s ruling that it was gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, was allowed to stick by a federal court in order to conduct the 2022 general election.

• Appealed to the Supreme Court: The case was eventually appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, through a different but related decision on redistricting in North Carolina, vacated the Ohio Supreme Court’s previous opinion on congressional districts and sent the issue back down to the state to be reconsidered.

Credit: AP

The big changes:

• Incumbent legislators: One considerable difference between the new proposal and the current system involves how the commission is told to deal with incumbent legislators. In the current system, incumbent legislators cannot be drawn into the same districts, which restricts the flexibility the commission has in drawing the maps. Under the new proposal, the hometowns of incumbent legislators would not be considered, which could result in incumbent legislators getting drawn out of their districts completely.

• Public process: The panel would meet more often than the Ohio Redistricting Commission is required to and would be bound to take more actions, such as the actual map drawing, in public — a significant diversion from the current process.

What would a new commission look like?

• The new commission, which backers insist would be nonpartisan and disconnected from politicians’ interests, would consist of five Republicans, five Democrats and five unaffiliated registered voters.

• Current and former politicians, political party officials, and lobbyists would be prohibited from serving on the commission.

• According to Citizens Not Politicians: Similar panels have been created in seven states: Michigan, Arizona; California; Colorado; Idaho, Montana; and Washington state.

Credit: Avery Kreemer

What they’re saying

• “My goal is to ensure that representation is fair,” Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio said. “What we’ve learned in these decades of extreme gerrymandering in Ohio is the only way that can happen is if politicians and lobbyists are taken out of the equation.”

• “As far as accountability, I don’t know where accountability is right now in the system we have, quite frankly,” said retired Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican who has become the face of the citizen-initiated amendment. “They weren’t accountable to the citizens, they weren’t accountable to the Supreme Court, and you know what happened.”

• “I think that the people who are making an important decision like this ought to be elected officials who are accountable to the public, not unknown bureaucrats somewhere someplace and subject to whatever rules (are in) a 32-page, single spaced document,”said Matt Huffman, R-Lima, Senate President.