Hello, and Happy Thursday,
When I called up Catherine Turcer on Tuesday, she mentioned that her daughter had just sent her a text message saying it must feel like she’s living the same day over and over again.
Turcer is the executive director of the Ohio chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, and one of the most knowledgeable people about redistricting in her state. Earlier that morning, the Ohio supreme court struck down the map for the state’s 15 congressional districts, saying they were so distorted in favor of Republicans that they violated the state constitution. It was the seventh time this year the court has struck down either a congressional or state legislative map (it has struck down the congressional map twice and state legislative districts five times).
Despite those rulings, Republicans have maneuvered to keep both the congressional and state legislative maps in place for this fall’s election. It has set up an extraordinary circumstance in Ohio: voters will cast ballots for federal and state representation this fall in districts that are unconstitutional.
Turcer and I have spoken several times over the last few months as the saga in Ohio has unfolded, and she is not someone who sugar-coats things. I’ve been interested in her perspective as someone who was initially optimistic about the reforms – she fought to pass them – but has seen the reality of how Republicans have brazenly ignored them this year.
“It’s incredibly painful to participate in elections that you know are rigged,” she told me. “I’ve been encouraging folks to look at the upcoming elections as important to participate because if we do just opt out, we would have even worse representation.”
This wasn’t the way things were supposed to happen.
After egregiously aggressive GOP gerrymandering in 2011, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 2015 that set new guardrails on the practice when it came to drawing state legislative lines. It left a bipartisan commission of lawmakers in control of the process, but said it had to follow certain rules, including a requirement that said districts can’t “primarily” favor a political party. In 2018, voters approved a measure that set similar constraints on congressional redistricting.
It was a huge win for reformers. Before 2015, there had been several statewide referendums to limit partisan gerrymandering and all of them failed. And even though lawmakers still had control over the redistricting process, Turcer believed that it could weed out the most severe gerrymandering. I covered the 2018 amendment, and I remember there was some criticism at the time about whether it went far enough to limit lawmakers.
Now, Ohio Republicans have validated that criticism. In both their congressional and state legislative maps, they’ve sought district lines that would give them a huge advantage, and have passed their plans on partisan lines. Each time the supreme court has rejected their efforts, they’ve only made marginal tweaks and submitted the plan again. Eventually, they ran out the clock, forcing courts to allow their maps to go into effect this year.
“This could have worked if the elected officials had approached this in good will,” she told me, making it clear lawmakers were to blame for the failure. “I am no longer assuming good will on anyone’s part… I no longer have faith that elected leaders will do the right thing when it comes time to draw voting districts.”
Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, tweeted on Wednesday what I thought was an insightful analysis of why the maps failed.
The failure of the Ohio reforms ultimately comes down to three things: Politicians were left in control; maps can still be passed on a party line basis; and, most importantly, courts can strike down but not draw a replacement map.
— Michael Li 李之樸 (@mcpli) July 19, 2022
The one big safeguard in the Ohio reforms was supposed to be that maps passed on a party-line basis have to be redrawn after 4 years-when maybe the other party would be in control. But Ohio is less swingy today & having to do a redraw seems like less of a risk to today's Rs.
— Michael Li 李之樸 (@mcpli) July 19, 2022
Most significantly, there was no meaningful “stick” to force Ohio Republicans to draw constitutional maps. Under the constitutional amendment, the Ohio supreme court can only send lawmakers back to the drawing board, not draw a map for it. And the only “punishment” lawmakers face for passing a map along partisan lines is that it won’t be in effect for an entire decade, a consequence Republican lawmakers were clearly unfazed by.
“We should have fought harder over leaving the Ohio redistricting in charge of mapmaking,” Turcer told me. “It seems really clear that giving the Ohio supreme court the stick, shall we say, not just the carrot, could have made an enormous difference.”
After seeing the reforms fail, Turcer said she expects a push to create an independent redistricting commission in Ohio, something that the chief justice of the Ohio supreme court, the critical swing vote in all the redistricting cases, has encouraged.
“It certainly hasn’t worked the way it should. The mapmakers are just drunk on power. And you take away the keys from drunks,” she said. “Clearly, the next step is an independent, insulated commission.”
Also worth watching…
The Trump administration sought to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census as part of an effort to change the way congressional seats are allocated
A bipartisan group of senators has introduced a bill to reform the Electoral Count Act.
