Ohio’s map for elections deserved scrutiny

WASHINGTON — Ohio has some of the nation’s most-gerrymandered statehouse and congressional maps, according to a new Associated Press analysis — a fact that comes as no surprise to those who have successfully pushed to reform the district-drawing process after the next census.

With a firm grip on Ohio state government, including sizable majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans were able to draw legislative and congressional maps with pinpoint precision, helping ensure they would maintain those majorities even if the political tide turned against them for a cycle or two.

In Ohio House races last year, Republicans got 52 percent of the vote but won 61 percent of the districts, allowing them to continue to hold a super-majority despite losing five seats. Based on data compiled by the Associated Press, Ohio’s gerrymandered House districts allowed Republicans to win seven more seats than they otherwise should have judging by vote totals.

That means the House, according to the analysis, would be 54–46 Republican, instead of the current 61-38, if the map were drawn fairly.

The Gop-drawn districts also protected Republicans in Ohio’s U.S. House delegation. Republicans got 52 percent of the vote but won 75 percent of the seats — the same 12-4 margin that has existed since the current district maps were drawn in 2011. According to the AP analysis, Ohio’s maps

allowed Republicans to hold three more seats than they otherwise should have.

Michael Li, senior redistricting counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said Ohio has one of the most “problematic” congressional maps in the nation, with an impenetrable 12–4 GOP advantage.

While Republicans hold all but one statewide nonjudicial office, he dismisses the notion that the state is overwhelmingly Republican.

“Ohio may be trending Republican, but it’s not a 75 percent Republican state,” he said. The map drawn in 2011 was “a very deliberate prioritization of politics over everything else.”

Richard Gunther, a professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University, said Ohio has been one of the worst actors in gerrymandering by multiple standards.

Even a shift in voter preference from 2016 to 2018 couldn’t overcome gerrymandering. For

example, he said, in Ohio, there was a 10.4 percent shift of votes for Republicans running for Congress in 2016 to votes for Democratic candidates in 2018. “Not one single seat was flipped,” he noted.

In Ohio’s 12th District, where Republican Rep. Pat Tiberi’s retirement spurred a special election, there was a 15 percent shift of Republican votes cast to Democratic votes cast, he said. It was not enough to change the party holding the seat.

Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, said the 2011 maps were drawn with “surgical precision,” as GOP mapmakers used “a lot more information than just typical partisan data” to create maps so solid that they have remained unchanged over the decade.

“When you have a robust, strong gerrymander, it makes it harder for the people who are marginalized to keep coming up with good people to run,” she said.

Turcer and leaders of groups such as the League

of Women Voters of Ohio hope that, while Republicans continue to hold all of state government, new voter–approved processes for drawing legislative and congressional maps will significantly reduce partisan gerrymandering and produce districts that better reflect the will of the electorate.

The goal of a congressional redistricting process approved by voters last May is for a map drawn with significant bipartisan support — either by the legislature or, if that fails, a seven–member commission of three statewide officeholders and four legislators.

And in 2015, voters approved a new process for legislative districts, creating a seven-member commission with at least two minority–party members. For a 10-year map to pass, it would take at least two minority-party votes, and the process says the commission “shall attempt to draw” a map that does not primarily favor a political party and corresponds closely to the statewide

preferences of voters.

But before the congressional maps are redrawn again in 2021, federal judges in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will decide, based on a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters, ACLU and others, whether Ohio has to redraw that map before the 2020 election. Arguments on that case were completed this month.

Gunther, who was one of the negotiators who crafted the language that went into the 2015 reform and who also negotiated on the 2018 reform, said he’s hopeful the reforms will make the process more fair.

“We don’t know how it’s going to pan out because the lines will be drawn by human beings,” he said.

But Gunther added, “I think we did a reasonable job of coming up with a series of procedures and criteria that will at least constrain partisan impulses.”