COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio Redistricting Commission has failed for a second time to reach the bipartisan consensus needed to pass 10-year maps of state legislative districts based on 2020 census totals.
Despite being scolded by the state's high court, the seven-member panel approved new maps along party lines in the face of a court-set Saturday deadline.
That means the plan would be good for just four years.
But the Ohio Supreme Court has reserved the right to review the panel's proposed change.
Voting rights and Democratic groups successfully challenged an earlier round of maps as an extreme partisan gerrymander.
Republicans defended the new district lines as constitutional.
After the commission approved the new maps, the Ohio Democratic Party released the following statement:
“Republicans on the commission are determined to play by their own rules in order to advance their purely partisan interests, ignoring Ohio voters, Supreme Court justices and the Ohio Constitution in the process. Flouting the rules didn’t work out for these GOP politicians the first time, and we’ll be fighting with everything we’ve got to make sure it doesn’t work now.”
Both Democrats on the commission voted against the new map. All five Republican members of the commission, including Governor Mike DeWine, voted for it.
The commission originally approved a state legislative map in September. That map was also approved on a party-line vote and would have been good for just four years.
Earlier in January the Ohio Supreme Court determined those maps did not align with voter-approved anti-gerrymandering rules, ruling them to disproportionally favor the GOP.
The court also said that those same groups who successfully sued after the first maps were released would be given the chance to file a lawsuit on the maps approved on Saturday.
On Sunday, Common Cause Ohio, a non-partisan voters advocacy group which advocates for an end to gerrymandering, released a statement on the approval of the new maps, which read in part:
Voters' pleas for a fair, transparent, and participatory redistricting process fell on deaf ears. After the Ohio Supreme Court forced state leaders to go back to the drawing board and draw fair maps, Ohioans hoped we would finally get a transparent redistricting process that lived up to the promise of the redistricting reform that voters overwhelmingly passed in 2018.
Instead, the Ohio Redistricting Commission deliberately cut Ohioans out of the remedial redistricting process. The Commission failed to provide the traditional meeting notices and instead went into recess on Thursday, January 20 around 5:30pm and did not reconvene until Saturday, January 22 after 3:00pm. The Ohio Redistricting Commission ignored calls to provide time for public testimony and only unveiled draft maps to the public – well after most of the decision-making on the maps was apparently completed.
The Ohio Supreme Court said it best, “We reject the notion that Ohio voters rallied so strongly behind an anti-gerrymandering amendment to the Ohio Constitution yet believed at the time that the amendment was toothless.” Ohioans overwhelmingly approved this new process for drawing fair Ohio House and Senate maps and the Ohio Supreme Court made their expectations clear. Voters deserve better.
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