'Best of our bad options' Federal judges order Ohio to use unconstitutional district maps
Ohioans will pick new state lawmakers on Aug. 2 using maps that the Ohio Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional, a federal court ruled Friday.
The costly, divisive saga to draw new maps for state House and Senate districts began with a constitutional amendment passed overwhelmingly by lawmakers in 2014 and by voters in 2015. Those changes aimed to curb partisan gerrymandering, which involves political parties crafting districts that disproportionately favored their candidates.
It ended Friday afternoon with federal judges picking maps that barely passed the Ohio Redistricting Commission and that the Ohio Supreme Court rejected for unfairly favoring Republicans.
"We chose the best of our bad options," the two-judge majority wrote in their order to Secretary of State Frank LaRose.
In many ways, Ohio's redistricting reform experiment has been a failure. The aspiration of a mapmaking process where Republicans, Democrats and the public could contribute to the final product was dashed by reality – maps drawn behind closed doors, presented at the last minute and passed along party lines.
More: Ohio Supreme Court rejects legislative maps for 5th time, but feds might use them anyway
"That question of state governance is not before this federal court today, just as it was not before us on April 20," the majority wrote. "Rather, our opinion addressed whether and when federal law required us to intervene."
But the dissenting judge disagreed.
Justice Algenon Marbley wrote that the May 28 deadline his fellow judges imposed caused Republicans on the redistricting commission not to act.
"I remain convinced that the best remedy, from a standpoint of federalism and comity, was the Johnson/McDonald Plan," Marbley wrote.
Those were the ones drawn by independent mapmakers and rejected by the 5-2 Republican majority.
Not the maps passed by four Republicans on the Ohio Redistricting Commission on Feb. 24. Those maps matched Ohioans' voting preferences, which amount to 54% for Republican candidates and 46% for Democratic ones, but dozens of so-called Democratic districts were more like tossups.
See the House and Senate maps on the popular redistricting website, Dave's Redistricting App.
"The remarkably one-sided distribution of toss-up districts is evidence of an intentionally biased map, and it leads to partisan asymmetry," the majority of the Ohio Supreme Court wrote in its 4-3 decision.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit Judge Amul Thapar and Western District of Kentucky Judge Benjamin Beaton, both appointed by former President Donald Trump, indicated they would select these maps if Ohio's mapmakers didn't craft a better alternative. Given that backstop, the Ohio Redistricting Commission didn't pass new maps.
These maps apply to the Aug. 2 primary and Nov. 8 general elections. The Ohio Redistricting Commission will need to craft different maps for 2024. By then, the deciding vote in the Ohio Supreme Court's redistricting decisions, Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, will no longer be on the bench.
LaRose estimated the second primary would cost taxpayers between $20 million to $25 million and add to voter confusion. Turnout is expected to be dismal.
Meanwhile, the Ohio Supreme Court is reviewing the state's congressional map, which the Ohio Redistricting Commission passed on March 2 and was used in the May 3 primary. Lawsuits filed against the map accuse Republicans of unnecessarily drawing districts to favor their candidates.
Jessie Balmert is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Akron Beacon Journal, Cincinnati Enquirer, Columbus Dispatch and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.
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This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Ohio to use unconstitutional redistricting maps in 2022 primary
