Can Ohio's redistricting be fixed?

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has figured out whom to blame for the state's redistricting debacle: elected officials. "It didn't work, and we need to fix it," the Republican told The Toledo Blade last week. "Taking it out of the hands, frankly, of elected officials is probably a good idea. How we do that, though, to make sure it is done in an impartial way, is a difficult challenge." The "it" in question is Ohio's process for drawing state legislative and congressional districts, which is normally done in the wake of each decennial census to make sure districts have close-to-equal populations. Overwhelming majorities of voters approved two amendments to the state Constitution in 2015 and 2018 that were supposed to limit gerrymandering and lead to districts that better represented the state's partisan divide. It did not go according to plan. Republicans used their control the Ohio General Assembly and the state executive offices whose leaders serve on the Ohio Redistricting Commission to ignore the voters' mandate and drew maps that overly favored their party. Democrats, who as members of the minority party were supposed to have a voice in the process, were likewise largely ignored. Without Democratic buy-in, the maps were only good for four years instead of the usual 10 years. The Ohio Supreme Court declared the maps unconstitutional. Republicans tweaked the maps slightly only to have the court strike them down. That ridiculous process played out again and again until voters were forced to use problematic maps when they went to the polls last year. DeWine was right, however. It wasn't so much the process that was the problem as the elected officials who failed to deliver what voters had clearly demanded: fair districts. It didn't have to be that way. DeWine and even Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who served on the commission, recognized at various points that there were problems with the maps, but they went along with their fellow Republicans anyway. Perhaps they feared the electoral repercussions. (Both men faced challengers from their right in last year's GOP primary.) Indeed, one of the few Republicans who sided with the will of the voters, then-Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, was unburdened by the prospect of facing a GOP primary in the next few years. That's because O'Connor, who sided with Democratic justices to strike down the maps, was too old to run for another term under state law. The Republican strategy for dealing with inconvenient Supreme Court rulings eventually evolved into simply waiting for O'Connor to leave the bench. (They also briefly considered impeaching her.) With O'Connor now out of the picture, we suspect the GOP majority on the court will be much more accommodating to Republican gerrymandering in future maps. That's if the state Supreme Court even has a role to play. Ohio Republicans have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing in favor of the independent state legislature theory. It's a fringe idea holding that only state legislatures have the power to draw districts and that anything interfering with such authority is unconstitutional. GOP-controlled North Carolina has gone to court advancing the same theory with an eye toward eliminating barriers to ever more extreme gerrymandering. If the U.S. Supreme Court rejects the argument — as it should — the question of how to fix redistricting in Ohio would remain in need of an answer. O'Connor and others are working on possible amendments to the Ohio Constitution, but it's too soon to say how effective their proposals might be and whether they could be subverted as the last round of gerrymandering amendments were. Another concern is timing. No proposal for a redistricting fix is likely to appear on the ballot until next year, but some Republicans, including LaRose, have been pushing to make amending the state constitution harder. Their measure could end up on the November ballot. DeWine is right that elected officials failed in their duty to craft fair districts. The questions now are whether Ohio can come up with a new redistricting mechanism and can find people who will take that responsibility seriously. As DeWine said, it will be a difficult challenge.