What will be the difference between 2005, 2012 and 2024 for citizen redistricting in Ohio?
Let’s look at the 2012 proposal.
The Voters First Ohio campaign went to court against the Ohio Ballot Board over the language of the measure. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled for the campaign, but when the Ballot Board met again, the ballot language was doubled in length.
The opponents of the 2012 measure, including both big business lobbies and the boards of at least two major newspapers, decried the alleged “lack of [electoral] accountability” of a citizen redistricting commission, as well as the mandated funding for the commission’s work.
Both newspapers instead extolled the idea of requiring a bipartisan supermajority from a politician-majority commission for passage of a map, and the proposal went down in defeat.
This was said before Ohio, in two legislatively-referred amendments in 2015 and 2018, replaced the Ohio Apportionment Board with the Ohio Redistricting Commission, which did no better in 2021-2023 at drawing fairer maps despite requiring bipartisan supermajority approval. Wonder if they changed their tune?
The CNP initiative seems to keep most of the 2012 proposal. Differences:
- The CNP proposal would involve a bipartisan panel of only retired judges to screen potential candidates for the commission. The 2012 plan would have involved sitting appellate court judges in the selection of commissioners.
- CNP’s plan bans prison gerrymandering.
The use of retired judges effectively sidesteps one of the sticking points of the 2012 plan, which drew the opposition of both the Ohio Judicial Conference and the Ohio State Bar Association for this reason. This amendment, certainly, needs as many supporters, or as few opponents, as possible.
There is no telling whether the big business lobbies have changed their tune. The Ohio Farm Bureau Association and Ohio Chamber of Commerce, both of which publicly opposed Issue 2 in 2012, both backed August 2023 Issue 1, which would have seriously hobbled direct democracy in the state. The failure of that amendment may not say too much about the fate of CNP’s initiative, but it does show the deep entrenchment of the political elite in Ohio that such a blatantly anti-democratic proposal as August 2023 Ohio Issue 1 would see the light of day.
But the repeated failures of citizen redistricting proposals at the ballot box, or at least the failures of their campaigns, need to be considered as teaching moments for those who assume that it will win this round in 2024. In addition, the chicanery of oppositional officeholders like the Secretary of State, who changed the ballot summary language of November 2023 Ohio Issue 1 to reflect Christian right-wing beliefs about abortion, should not be ignored (even if his actions failed to stop the measure from victory at the polls). Victory is not certain, and what those past campaigns endured should help this campaign improvise, adapt and overcome in 2024.
Let’s also see if the CNP proposal makes it to the ballot at all. After being approved by the Attorney General (who accepted it after previously rejecting it twice) and Ohio Ballot Board, the campaign recently voluntarily reset the clock after discovering a typo, then rewrote the petition and sent it back to the Attorney General, who approved it a second time. It now awaits the Ohio Ballot Board’s decision before it is finally set to begin collecting signatures.
