A Republican plan designed to erase partisan gerrymandering from Ohio’s congressional redistricting process was swiftly slapped down Wednesday by reform advocates who say it would do little to improve the process.
The opening salvo in a rushed effort to get a redistricting proposal on the May ballot found no bipartisan love Wednesday, despite the proposal’s requirement that minority party votes would, for the first time ever, be required in order to approve a map.
Leaders of the Fair Districts = Fair Elections coalition, which is pursuing a separate proposal for the November ballot, argued it could make the process worse.
"It would easily be possible to construct a 12-3 Republican map using these rules," said Richard Gunther, Ohio State University political science professor emeritus, who has worked with the coalition. His count assumes Ohio loses another congressional seat in 2022. The current breakdown is 12-4 Republican.
"This would enshrine rules that are extremely unfair that would perpetuate one-party domination of our congressional delegation."
Legislative Democrats also said they did not support the plan.
Unlike the current process, which allows the majority party to gerrymander a congressional map to its benefit, Sen. Matt Huffman, R-Lima, outlined a proposal Wednesday that would require support of at least one-third of Democrats before a new congressional map could be approved for the full 10 years. The next map will be drawn in 2021, after the census.
Legislative Republicans deliberately avoided changing the congressional map-making process in 2015 when it crafted a bipartisan plan to revamp the legislative process. Now they want to get in front of a November ballot issue by a coalition including the League of Women Voters of Ohio that would take the process out of the legislature's hands and give it to a seven-member commission of statewide and legislative members.
The action follows a federal court ruling Tuesday that ordered North Carolina’s legislature to immediately redraw its congressional map, finding it was drawn to ensure Republican "domination." The U.S. Supreme Court already is considering gerrymandering cases out of Wisconsin and Maryland.
Redistricting reform boils down to two key components: how a map is approved, and what rules limit how lines are drawn.
Under the proposal, expected to be drafted into legislation next week, the House and Senate would retain control of the process, but approving a map would take a three-fifths vote in each chamber, including one-third of minority party members.
"It means there is going to be substantial influence by the minority party on how this map is drawn," Huffman said. "Does that mean they get to draw it? No."
Sen. Vernon Sykes, D-Akron, said the one-third threshold for Democratic support is a deliberate effort to peel off black lawmakers to support a map.
"It divides the minority party along racial lines," said Sykes, who is black. "It’s distasteful. It’s been used in the past to pack districts so minority candidates might be more probable to win, but that’s not in the best interest, necessarily, of the total population."
Under the plan, if lawmakers fail to get the necessary level of bipartisan support, then the process moves to a seven-member redistricting commission, where it would require four votes, including two minority party members, to approve a 10-year map.
If that fails, the commission majority approves a map and the legislature gets one final stab at it, requiring a majority vote and one-fifth of minority party members. If that fails, then the map takes effect, but for only four years.
Huffman’s proposed rules for drawing new congressional districts differ from those proposed by the Fair Districts coalition, which calls for more stringent limits on splitting counties.
Under Huffman's plan, rural counties could not be split more than once, but the 10 most populous counties in the state could see multiple splits.
"Gee, I wonder why that is," Gunter said, noting the Democratic concentration in urban counties. "What you’re doing with this proposal is guaranteeing smaller, rural counties be kept whole, at the same time you invite the promiscuous splitting of large urban counties. That’s a recipe for gerrymandering."
Huffman said the rules would invalidate a number of districts drawn by Republicans in 2011.
That's not good enough, said Ann Henkener, redistricting specialist for the League of Women Voters of Ohio.
"Making some technical changes to try to solve some of the criticisms of the current map really does not address the next map," she said.
The Fair Districts coalition says it has collected 193,000 internally verified signatures of the 306,000 needed to qualify for the November ballot.
Getting a legislative proposal on the May ballot would require a three-fifths vote in each chamber by Feb. 7. The goal is a bipartisan plan, but Republicans have majorities large enough to approve it without Democratic votes.
jsiegel@dispatch.com
@phrontpage