Expert: Balance required when redrawing voting districts
COLUMBUS — A top expert on the state Constitution says Ohio’s new redistricting rules, overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2015 as an anti-gerrymandering reform, clearly require state House and Senate district maps to meet political fairness criteria.
Ohio’s Republican legislative leaders, House Speaker Bob Cupp and Senate President Matt Huffman, have argued the new political standards for state legislative maps are “aspirational” — as opposed to mandatory — and can’t be legally enforced.
But Steven Steinglass, a retired Cleveland State University professor who has advised past GOP leaders on state constitutional issues and co-authored a 2004 textbook on the Ohio Constitution, said the Ohio Supreme Court clearly could enforce the political standards if it chooses to.
“I’ve looked at this issue and believe the standards of non-partisanship, proportionality and compactness are legally enforceable,” said Steinglass, who served as the senior policy advisor to the Ohio Constitutional Modernization Commission from 2013 to 2017. “The Soviet constitution was ‘aspirational,’ but these provisions of the Ohio Constitution are enforceable.”
Whether or not the political standards can be enforced is the key question facing the Ohio Supreme Court as it considers a trio of lawsuits seeking to block the new maps. The new maps, passed by Republicans on the Ohio Redistricting Commission by a 5-2 vote, likely would award Republicans 66% of Ohio’s legislative seats compared to their 54% of the state’s votes during the past decade’s worth of statewide partisan elections.
Anything above 60% control of the state legislature gives Republicans a veto-proof supermajority. The maps would go into effect for the state primary election in May.
Voter-rights groups, Democrats and generally left-leaning advocacy groups have filed three separate lawsuits challenging the maps, asking the Ohio Supreme Court to reject them.
Defending against the lawsuits, Cupp and Huffman’s arguments hinge on constitutional language that says the newly created Ohio Redistricting Commission “shall attempt” to draw maps that are politically proportionate to statewide voter preferences and which benefit neither party. Huffman has said the “attempt” language makes the political standards optional, unlike other new redistricting standards, like those limiting how counties and cities can be split.
But Steinglass said the extent to which “shall attempt” makes the new law’s meaning unclear, legal precedent directs judges to consider what voters were told when they approved the constitutional amendment.
“Constitutional language is often ambiguous, and the court in construing them looks to what voters were told as being of extreme importance. It also looks to the context, what issues, what problem was being addressed by the constitutional amendment,” Steinglass said. “In other words, it looks at the issue in a holistic way, not a narrow, word-parsing way.”
In November 2015, Ohioans approved the new redistricting rules by a nearly three-toone margin.
During the campaign leading up the election, voters heard that the new rules would make Ohio’s legislative elections more politically representative, including from then-Republican lawmakers who later became members of the redistricting commission that approved the maps.
For instance, Fair Districts Ohio, a political group co-founded by Huffman to convince voters to approve the 2015 reform, published a breakdown of what the reform would do. The document, entered as evidence in support of the redistricting lawsuits, promoted the reform by saying it “protects against gerrymandering by prohibiting any district from primarily favoring one political party” and “requires districts to closely follow the statewide preferences of the voters.”
Groups suing the state over the maps also have flagged the state’s official description of what the reform would do. An official ballot issue argument, prepared in part by Keith Faber, a Republican
who’s now state Auditor and serves as one of the seven redistricting commission members, says the new rules would “ensure that no district plan should be drawn to favor or disfavor a political party.”
Before voting 81-7 in December 2014 to send the new rules to voters for approval, state lawmakers also were told the new political standards were requirements. The Legislative Service Commission, the legislature’s research arm, described them as such in a written analysis of the effects of House Joint Resolution 12, the official name for the legislative act that codified the rules and sent them to voters for approval.
As recently as 2020, the Ohio Supreme Court has cited the importance of analyzing the background events that led voters to approve a state constitutional amendment. In that case, officials in Centerville asked the court to decide whether “Marsy’s Law” a voter-approved constitutional amendment which expanded crime victims’ rights to be notified of legal proceedings, also gave new legal rights to cities.