There are still voices calling for reform, including the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce, whose President and CEO Chris Kershner told this new outlet that the organization “respectfully requests the Ohio General Assembly take up redistricting reform in a bipartisan general assembly initiated process; and ensure that maintaining community alignment, regional unification and economic growth is prioritized.”
Many Republican officials opposed to Issue 1 argued that the current system was adequate. That wasn’t the case, though, for Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who both vehemently opposed Issue 1 and openly acknowledged that the current system “simply does not work very well. It needs to be changed.”
In July, DeWine told reporters that, whether Issue 1 passed or not, he’d ask the Ohio legislature to change Ohio’s redistricting plan to be similar to the state of Iowa’s, which for forty years has banned its map drawers from looking at voter data and instead requires them to solely rely on the data of the latest census.
This would completely remove Ohio’s proportionality requirement, which requires maps to take into account historic voting patterns and create districts roughly mirroring the statewide partisan leanings.
DeWine said he wanted to have full hearings on the plan in the legislature and then put it on a ballot for voters to approve or disapprove in 2025.
DeWine’s proposal differs from Issue 1, which proposed removing politicians from the system, handing over map drawing authority to a citizen panel, and removing some of the restrictive rules on map drawing in order to achieve proportional maps.
Senate President Matt Huffman, who will be in the Ohio House next term, said in a recent podcast that he’d be interested in making further tweaks to the state’s redistricting system but did not directly weigh in on the Iowa plan.
“I think in a process like this, there are always ways to improve it, not only just through the Constitution but even statutorily,” Huffman said. “We can sit down and say, ‘Here’s is how this is going to go.’ Of course, we’d have to do that in a way that doesn’t violate the Constitution.”
Huffman mentioned that any redistricting plan aiming to change the Constitution would likely need bipartisan support from voters on the ballot in order to pass.
Republican former Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, who spearheaded Issue 1 following repeat frustrations with politicians’ maps while leading the Ohio Supreme Court, said she would not immediately try to put another reform effort on the ballot.
“I don’t think that we’ll be putting forth this kind of effort immediately,” O’Connor told reporters shortly after the race was called last week. “We’ll regroup, we’ll think about it, but that hasn’t been discussed.”
O’Connor said, despite the defeat, she was heartened by Ohioans’ shared goals to end gerrymandering, but she believes voters were “duped” by the opposition campaign and an unflattering summary of the proposal that met each voter on their ballots.
“Everybody that voted in this election, I venture to say, thought they were voting to end gerrymandering. It’s as simple as that,” she said.
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Avery Kreemer can be reached at 614-981-1422, on X, via email, or you can drop him a comment/tip with the survey below.
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