Ohio's redistricting saga continues as lawmakers with to draw a new 15-district congressional map. The job is now with Ohio Redistricting Commission, a bipartisan panel of state leaders led by majority Republicans. They’re charged with coming up with an agreement this month after a bipartisan committee of lawmakers failed to approve a map last month.
This is the second phase of a three-part process for drawing district lines for lawmakers that was approved by Ohio voters in 2018. And it’s left Democrats and some voters who rallied for it years ago with a bad taste in their mouths and hungry for change.
The current redistricting process
In March 2018, Republican former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger raised shots of schnapps alongside Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Ohio. They were celebrating a congressional redistricting overhaul that he said would “terminate gerrymandering” if voters approved it in two months later.
"The legislature got together, Democrats and Republicans and solved the problem. It's unbelievable," Schwarzenegger said.
It was built on the change voters approved to the map-drawing process for legislative districts in 2015. The 2018 congressional redistricting amendment passed with nearly 75% support from Ohio voters.
Current House Speaker Matt Huffman (R-Lima), who in 2018 had been term-limited out of office, helped lead the effort to sell the amendment alongside then-Rep. Vernon Sykes (D-Akron).
“If the minority doesn’t agree, and two members of the minority party don’t agree, the map will only last for four years. Now the majority can still redraw the map after four years. How might that help? Well, the answer is legislators and the folks involved don’t want the districts to change in that short of a period of time,”Huffman said in an interview in 2017. ”They have an incentive to get a ten-year map. And that’s true for the minority party and the majority party.”
The process approved by voters in 2018 was intended to have three parts. The first is for a bipartisan legislative committee to attempt to agree on a map. That deadline passed on Sept. 30 without such an agreement, so it moved to the Ohio Redistricting Commission. It has a month to come up with a bipartisan map. But many observers think that’s unlikely.
Taking time or “running the clock out”?
Democrats proposed a map for the legislative committee to consider before the Sept. 30 deadline. It would yield a congressional delegation of eight Republicans and seven Democrats in most years. It was rejected by majority Republicans as “gerrymandered” and not developed in the spirit of the 2018 amendment, since it was presented before there have been any input from hearings. Republicans haven’t yet publicly unveiled a map and may not until the third phase of the process. Democrats have said there have not be bipartisan talks.
If the Ohio Redistricting Commission doesn’t pass a map with the votes of the two Democrats on the panel, the process goes to the full General Assembly. A map must pass there by Nov. 30, but only needs to be approved by a simple majority. Republicans have supermajorities in the House and Senate.
Last month, Huffman said that he’d hoped Republicans would been able to work with Democrats in urban areas to find agreement for a map.
“That's the kind of agreement that might have happened in September. But I didn't see that that was happening,” Huffman said. “And I think when the Dems came out with the map that said, ‘this is what we want, based on a premise that of this percentage of vote’—which is nowhere in the Constitution, is nowhere in the law—it's pretty clear that we weren't going to have the old style compromise in the month of September. So now we ask a new question in October.”
But the lack of a Republican map has frustrated supporters of the current redistricting method.
Common Cause Ohio Executive Director Catherine Turcer, who supported the amendment in 2018, said it appears the process will be concluded in November, when a purely partisan map can be approved by Republican lawmakers.
"They have been dragging their feet and they have in fact got what they want," Turcer said.
On the legislative committee’s final day of work in September, Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio (D-Lakewood) said this is not what voters intended.
“For a map to be passed, it was required that it be bipartisan," Antonio said. "I interpret that as the will of the people for us to sit down and work together. I don’t interpret it as ‘we’ll just sit back and run the clock out which, unfortunately, seems to be what the plan is here.”
Antonio said voters intended fairness to be part of the constitutional process. Sen. Jane Timken (R-Jackson Twp.) responded, “the word ’fairness’ is not in the Constitution, right?" That prompted an outburst of laughter from the audience, many of whom felt fairness was the driving force behind the change.
The disagreement over basic interpretations of the process showed the chasm between the two parties.
Commission will meet soon even without a map
Republicans and Democrats view the timeline in this process differently. Democrats want hearings on their proposed map. Republicans have repeatedly said the map isn’t due until the end of November. Huffman told reporters that Republicans may not show their hand until then.
“There isn't a map until I know what needs to go into it in order to get an agreement. And then we can present that to the public. But we also want the public having input,” Huffman said at the beginning of October. “So we'll see what happens in the next 31 days. And then if that if that doesn't work, we'll start off in November with a new process.”
But a map passed with only one-party support, which is what could happen when the process goes to supermajority Republicans in the legislature, won't last ten years. So, the carrot that was sold to voters as the goal to bipartisan redistricting efforts in 2018 is seen as more of a stick by many who voted for it.
Many one-time backers are opponents now
Turcer is among those supported of the change in the process in 2018 who doesn’t think it is working now. She and many Democrats had worked alongside many Republicans to come up with a process that was heralded to be bipartisan.
“One of the things I think is really sad here is there are all sorts of ways where lawmakers, elected officials, are encouraged to live up to the obligations in the Ohio constitution,” Turcer said. “Now, clearly they’re not adequate.”
And if redistricting isn’t confusing enough, the current Congressional map has lasted four years. But if Republicans pass a partisan map in November, Turcer said it would last six years. In 2031, a four-year map could pass again.
In 2024, Turcer and others, including Republican former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, asked voters to create an independent commission of non-politicians to draw maps. Republican officials were opposed. Gov. Mike DeWine said if voters rejected the Citizens Not Politicians amendment, he'd work with the legislature to change redistricting again, modeled off a nonpartisan process used in Iowa.
In a year where Ohio helped Donald Trump win a second term as president and no Democrats won statewide, the issue failed. Many voters also said they were confused about the language approved by Republicans on the Ohio Ballot Board that included the word “gerrymander.” And DeWine, who has often found himself at odds with legislative Republicans, has not delivered on his promise to voters. He’s said a map needs to be drawn soon, and it would be too time-consuming, costly and difficult to make a change right now.
Turcer said she and others still want change.
“This is a fight that will keep going, and it’s just going to take a little longer," Turcer said.
Turcer and others involved with redistricting haven’t ruled out the possibility of going back to the ballot at some point, though it would take a lot of money. But she said the fight could go to courts as it has in the past.
The first time Ohio lawmakers did congressional redistricting under the 2018 process, lawsuits were filed in state and federal court. The Ohio Supreme Court twice ruled the congressional maps submitted were unconstitutionally gerrymandered, but allowed the second map to be used in 2022. In 2023, the Ohio Supreme Court allowed the existing map to be used for the 2024 elections, after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling vacated the Ohio court’s previous decision.
