John Jefferson
Ohio voters will see misleading language when they go to vote on an anti-gerrymandering proposal this fall after the state supreme court greenlit the deceptive wording written by Republicans.
The Republican-controlled Ohio ballot board approved the language on Wednesday in a 3-2 party-line vote, two days after the Republican-led state supreme court voted 4-3 to correct various defects the justices found in what the board had already passed. The court’s ruling, however, did not require the ballot board to rewrite some of the most significant portions of the amendment.
If enacted, the proposal – Issue 1 – would strip lawmakers of their power to draw the boundaries for state legislative and congressional districts and hand it to a 15-person bipartisan independent commission composed of regular citizens. The panel would be constitutionally prohibited from distorting district lines to give one party an unfair advantage, a practice known as gerrymandering.
But the language the Ohio ballot board approved for the ballot says that the panel would be “required to gerrymander”. Citizens Not Politicians, the group behind the 5 November amendment, sued last month, asserting the language “may be the most biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional” the state has ever seen.
In an unsigned opinion, the state supreme court said the language was acceptable. Because the panel would be required to draw districts that roughly represented the partisan results in recent statewide Ohio elections, it was not misleading to say that the panel would be required to gerrymander, the court majority said. “They mandate the new commission draw district boundaries that give a political advantage to an identifiable group – Republicans in some districts and Democrats in others,” the court said.
The high court ordered two of eight disputed sections of the ballot description to be rewritten while upholding the other six the issue’s backers had contested. The court’s three Democratic justices dissented. “What the ballot board has done here is tantamount to performing a virtual chewing of food before the voters can taste it for themselves to decide whether they like it or not,” Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote for the dissent.
Republicans, who currently control the mapmaking process, drew districts that gave them a distorted advantage and repeatedly ignored prior rulings from the state supreme court to redraw the lines.
State senator Paula Hicks-Hudson, one of the two Democrats who sit on the ballot board, told reporters after it met: “This was done and it was created for the purpose of hoodwinking voters.” The Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, who chairs the board, did not take questions from the press after the vote.
In Monday’s opinion, the high court’s majority noted that it can only invalidate language approved by the ballot board if it finds the wording would “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters”. The majority found most of the language included in the approved summary and title did not do that but merely described the extensive amendment in detail.
The two sections that justices said were mischaracterized involve when a lawsuit would be able to be filed challenging the new commission’s redistricting plan and the ability of the public to provide input on the mapmaking process.
The exact language of the constitutional amendment will be posted at polling locations.
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