REDISTRICT

Meanwhile, Republican legislative leaders who oppose that plan want to work out a proposal for the May ballot.

“We’re going to stay there until we’re absolutely convinced we can’t get something. We’re still at the table,” Taylor-Miesle said of the talks. “There’s no doubt that the parties are not yet close enough together for it to be clear that we can get a deal.”

The two major sticking points are how many county splits to allow, and whether the concept of

representational fairness should be required.

“We’ve tried to listen to them as much as we could, and we’ve made some concessions,” said Rep. Kirk Schuring, R-Canton, who has been joined in meetings by Sen. Matt Huffman, R-Lima, and Senate staff member Ray DiRossi, the top GOP mapmaker. “We’re going to continue to work with them.”

GOP leaders have said they will not move forward with a May ballot issue unless Democrats and the coalition are in support. If that doesn’t happen, expect Republicans to mount an opposition campaign to the Fair Elections plan in November.

Taylor-Miesle said she agrees with what Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted said this week when he told cleveland.com that a redistricting plan needs only two key rules: a bipartisan vote and limiting county splits by dividing them only after the entire population has been used to draw a district.

Limiting county splits is key to limiting gerrymandering, said Taylor-Miesle.

But Republican legislators want the ability to split the state’s more populous counties into two or three congressional districts. Coalition supporters say that could dilute Democratic votes.

Schuring said he wants to

be sure the plan still works 50 years from now, not just to alter today’s districts.

“The true check is to make sure we have requirements for sufficient bipartisan support in the approval process of the map,” he said.

Some observers say that the distrust the two parties have of each other compounds the difficulty of finding common ground, as each side judges proposals based on the worst thing the other side could do with them.

Both sides have indicated that the idea of representational fairness, where the breakdown of district representation has some relation to the statewide preference of voters, is a “deal breaker.”

Taylor- Miesle said the requirement is vital. “We have an incredibly active grass- roots base that are educated about this and have expectations for what a deal looks like, and that’s the deal we’re going to bring home, if there’s going to be one.”

Huffman and other Republicans have opposed such a requirement, arguing it is not well- defined and could require a different type of gerrymandering. Republicans hold 12 of the state’s 16 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.