Members of Fair Districts Ohio gather in front of the Rhodes State Office Tower before an Ohio Redistricting Commission meeting in September 2023. (Photo by Susan Tebben, Ohio Capital Journal.)
A redraw of Ohio’s U.S. Congressional district map will happen this year under the same politician-controlled process as before, after voters rejected anti-gerrymandering reform in November, but with plenty of insight from the past, voting rights advocates say.
The congressional map Ohio has been using for the last four years are up for a redraw due to a lack of bipartisan support when the map was passed by the legislature in 2022. Ohio’s redistricting laws require them to be redrawn after four years without the support of both parties. If the map gets bipartisan support, they last for 10 years.
The map currently being used is the second version, which was rewritten after the first map, passed in 2021, was struck down as unconstitutionally gerrymandered by the Ohio Supreme Court.
The second map was ruled unconstitutionally partisan as well, but it was never rewritten, as legislative leaders balked at the idea that the state supreme court held the power to compel such action. The map passed in 2022 stood as the map used in the last election.
The congressional map was just part of a years-long redistricting process that was fraught with contention, lawsuits in both federal and state courts, and such harsh public scrutiny that a ballot initiative was brought to try to change the process and remove the elected officials from the Ohio Redistricting Commission all together.
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Despite the fact that the ballot measure that was Issue 1 on November’s general election ballot went down in defeat, advocates who supported the measure and plan to speak up every step of the way as congressional redistricting moves forward, say voters still sent a message about what they want to see from district map-drawing.
“The one thing that has kept people going, whether they voted yes, or whether they voted no, everybody was opposed to gerrymandering,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio.
The fact that Ohioans are more knowledgeable and more focused on the impacts of redistricting and gerrymandering indicates “significant headway” in the fight for accountability in the state, Turcer said. Also, constitutional or not, with the congressional map now having been in place for years, legislators and the Ohio Redistricting Commission will get to hear real perspective from residents in the districts.
“One of the benefits of the remap is that voters have been using these districts and will have some thoughts about whether they made sense or whether they divided things too much,” Turcer said.
Until the legislature’s end-of-September deadline, advocacy groups will be preparing the public for the process, as well as talking with legislators to try and start the process off well.
“The constitution requires a transparent process that robustly engages Ohio voters, and so we encourage the General Assembly to start this process immediately so that Ohioans have ample opportunities to give their input,” said Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio.
The GOP-created congressional districts approved by the Ohio Redistricting Commission on March 2, 2022.
In the meantime, groups are also watching the process as it pertains to local regions as well. The LWV made their thoughts known during the Cleveland City Council’s recent redraw of wards, which was passed quickly just after the new year and without a committee hearing on the most recent version of the maps.
In a letter to the council from League of Women Voters of Greater Cleveland co-presidents Nadia Zaiem and Lisa Cech, the group expressed their disappointment in the way the process went considering the council had previously passed a resolution in support of November’s Issue 1 ballot initiative.
“However, we have not seen that same commitment to fairness, transparency and public engagement during this process,” Zaiem and Cech wrote. “Instead, you have followed a similar playbook to that of the Ohio Redistricting Commission … All of this is exactly why the league has fought for decades to remove politicians from the map-making process, regardless of who is engaging in gerrymandering and whether the motivation is partisan advantage or incumbent advantage.”
It’s hard to know how the process will go this time around, though it’s easy to be skeptical that the process will go just as it did before, with missed deadlines and last-minute map-approval, especially with the legislature also facing a deadline to pass the state’s biennial operating budget. But advocates are still hopeful Ohioans will get their voices out there.
“It’s like starting the whole process again,” Turcer said. “And that means good public hearings, it means good opportunities for the citizens of Ohio to draw maps and present them to legislators.”
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