COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio advocates believe lawmakers will finally be able to be held accountable now that an anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment will be on the November ballot. Unsurprisingly, politicians who benefit from the redistricting process are not in favor of losing that power.
Ohio could look drastically different in the coming years.
"It was such an incredible feeling to know that we made the ballot,” Jen Miller with the League of Women Voters said. "This is about the everyday people of Ohio taking power back."
Miller is a part of Citizens Not Politicians, a coalition of about one hundred organizations ranging from unions to religious groups, plus an additional 70 business leaders with ranging political beliefs, all dedicated to preventing gerrymandering.
She has been advocating for redistricting reform for about a decade now. She got the news late Tuesday afternoon that CNP's anti-gerrymandering amendment has gathered enough signatures to proceed to voters on the Nov. ballot.
"When politicians and lobbyists get to rig maps, it harms every Ohio voter and our democracy," she added.
The Ohio Secretary of State’s Office certified 535,005 signatures for the initiative despite only needing 413,487 to get on the ballot. The office also said the initiative received signatures from 58 of the 88 counties and at least 5% of the total vote cast for governor in the last gubernatorial election. Ohio law requires measures to have signatures in at least 44 counties.
Currently, Ohio lawmakers draw the maps — ones that directly impact them and their colleagues.
The Ohio Redistricting Commission (ORC) is made up of seven spots. Two will always go to Republicans and two to Democrats in the Statehouse. The three remaining seats include the governor, secretary of state and auditor.
The proposal creates the 15-member Ohio Citizens Redistricting Commission (OCRC) made up of Republican, Democratic and independent citizens who broadly represent the different geographic areas and demographics of the state.
It bans current or former politicians, political party officials, lobbyists and large political donors from sitting on the commission.
It requires fair and impartial districts by making it unconstitutional to draw voting districts that discriminate against or favor any political party or individual politician. It also mandates the commission to operate under an open and independent process.
For months, Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima) has been a vocal opponent of redistricting reform. Answering questions in June, Huffman said Ohioans would have no recourse if the citizen commission drew problematic maps.
"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," the president said.
He believes that with changes the amendment would make to law, gerrymandering would be easier.
"It removes the restrictions on dividing local communities, communities of interest, cities, counties, townships, making sure there are compact districts," he added.
There are guidelines around each of those issues, it isn't a free-for-all, Miller said.
Huffman argued during a post-primary event at the Ohio Chamber of Commerce that this would be detrimental to the state, saying the new process would provoke an “extraordinary” amount of legal challenges.
“When allowed to work in the summer of 2023, [the redistricting process] did work,” he said in March.
Huffman’s spokesperson, John Fortney, echoed this sentiment on Wednesday.
“This 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.
Miller and other advocates have routinely pointed out that Huffman was criticized by the bipartisan Ohio Supreme Court, which struck down his maps seven different times, telling him to stop gerrymandering to help Republicans.
Former Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, a Republican, vowed to fix what she calls a broken system. She became the leader in the fight against gerrymandering in 2022.
Due to age limits for the court, she finished her term at the end of 2022 but told me back in August of 2023 that she was still working nonstop.
"What have I been doing since I've retired?" O'Connor said in an interview with us. "If I had to do a title, it would be redistricting, redistricting, redistricting."
She is now the face of the CNP movement.
"The Republicans were interested in a supermajority, maintaining a supermajority," she said. "Those are the considerations that are the antithesis of fair maps."
But state Rep. Adam Bird (R-New Richmond) and plenty of other Republicans argue that the system works fine, and only became a mess due to O'Connor.
"I am of the opinion that the maps were constitutional," Bird said about the legislative maps that were shut down five times and the twice-rejected congressional maps. "They became more gerrymandered as we went along in order to try to comply with the court's requests."
Gov. Mike DeWine, who is also on the ORC, said he is reviewing the amendment.
"I spent a lot of time thinking about it and trying to really understand exactly what it would do," DeWine said Wednesday. "I've also looked at what other states have done — so stay tuned."
But he told us in an interview in the winter that he doesn’t like the current system.
DeWine said that he wished he wasn’t involved in the map-making process.
RELATED: How can Ohio lawmakers be held accountable with gerrymandered districts? Gov. DeWine weighs in
"It just didn't work, it was a mess... I don't think the legislature should be involved in redistricting," DeWine said. "I don't think the governor should be involved."
He did, however, express concerns about how to find map drawers that people have trust in.
Why is this needed?
For Miller, this isn’t a partisan issue.
"This is about restoring balance and fairness," she said.
The League of Women Voters first started fighting in Ohio during the 1970s, back when Democrats were gerrymandering. Republicans actually supported an overhaul, she added.
"We need to have lawmakers who listen to us, the people of Ohio, right now because lawmakers know they will win their seat over and over again," Miller said.
RELATED: Ohio GOP again attempts to go around voters, this time on redistricting and minimum wage
Democratic politicians, organizations ranging from unions to police and even fellow Republicans have criticized the vast majority of the Ohio GOP for going against democracy for the following: Going against the will of the voters on anti-gerrymandering reform they passed in both 2015 and 2018, going against a bipartisan Ohio Supreme Court that rejected said gerrymandered maps seven separate times, trying to subvert the people's voice on abortion, marijuana and voting access (special election to make the constitution harder to amend), failing to pass constitutional funding for public schools for decades and a seemingly endless list of other fights Democrats lose time and time again (they say because the district maps are gerrymandered).
Something that brought together Democrats and Republicans in their anger against the state lawmakers was the August 2023 special election. Opponents struck down Issue 1, which would have made it harder to amend the state constitution. It failed 57-43%.
Twenty-two of Ohio's 88 counties voted no against Issue 1, making up nearly 60% of the vote. Twelve fall into the urban category, six in the partly rural and four totally rural. Fifteen of the 22 counties voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
RELATED: How Issue 1 was defeated
"[Lawmakers] can play to party extremes and to big-pocketed donors," Miller added.
Legislation, like a ban on transgender middle and high schoolers from participating in athletics, gets passed — with it only impacting 0.0000075% of the population. However, the biggest issues Ohioans tell us they want to see state lawmakers address are inflation, property taxes and healthcare. Legislation on those is rarely a topic of conversation, according to groups dedicated to affordable housing.
What happens next?
The initiative now heads to the Ohio Ballot Board, led by Secretary of State Frank LaRose, where the language will be reviewed and can be changed as it was with last November’s Issue 1 abortion amendment.
According to CNP, the ballot board, which has not yet scheduled the meeting for the measure’s consideration, has until Aug. 22 to “write and adopt the language that will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot” based on constitutional requirements to “properly identify the substance of the proposal to be voted on.”
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