Yellow Springs voters will go to the polls at Antioch University Midwest Tuesday, Nov. 5. (Submitted photo)
Locals sound off on Issue 1
- Published: October 20, 2024
Village Council approved a resolution on Monday, Oct. 7, in support of Ohio Issue 1, and encouraging citizens to vote “yes” on the proposed constitutional amendment — the latest voter-led attempt at addressing the issue of gerrymandering in the state.
The resolution was put forth by a group of local residents who have worked this year with Citizens Not Politicians, the statewide nonpartisan grassroots group that has led the effort to get Issue 1 in front of voters this November.
In speaking with the News over the last few weeks, local supporters of Issue 1 have said they’re behind the effort because it aims to succeed where past efforts failed, putting a stop to gerrymandering by removing politicians from the process of drawing district maps.
For those who don’t know, gerrymandering is, essentially, drawing a political district map in a way that favors a particular political party. The word itself is drawn from an 1812 redistricting map signed by Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, in which one of the redrawn districts was compared to a salamander.
Politicians who employ gerrymandering as a strategy do so by “cracking,” spreading voters of one party across a number of districts to prevent their gaining a foothold in a single district; and “packing,” confining voters of a party to the fewest number of districts to minimize those voters’ overall impact in an election.
No matter the method, Issue 1 supporters say the outcome of gerrymandering is the same, with some votes robbed of their power.
“Gerrymandering can make it difficult to hold politicians accountable,” local resident MJ Dodson said last week during a presentation on Issue 1 in the Senior Center’s Great Room; Dodson has been working with multiple campaigns to end gerrymandering, including this year’s Citizens Not Politicians efforts, since 2015.
“If [politicians] know their seat is safe, they don’t necessarily need to respond to you,” Dodson told those assembled for the presentation. “You’ve probably run into people who say, ‘I don’t know anymore — my vote doesn’t count.’ They can be saying that for a lot of different reasons, but gerrymandering might be one of them.”
Efforts to combat gerrymandering in the state have been led by voters over the last decade, with Ohioans approving two redistricting reform amendments to the state constitution in 2015 and 2018. The amendments, in part, created the Ohio Redistricting Commission, composed of the governor, auditor, secretary of state and four lawmakers, and put limits on how municipalities could be split when drawing maps.
But when the time came to create new redistricting maps in 2022, the amendments approved in 2015 and 2018 didn’t seem to hold much weight for the newly created Ohio Redistricting Commission: Multiple versions of the maps were struck down by the Ohio Supreme Court — led by now-retired Republican Justice Maureen O’Connor, who this year has spearheaded the effort behind Issue 1 — for not adhering to the anti-gerrymandering amendments.
The process was long, drawn-out and resulted in delayed primaries in 2022, held in August in a special election that cost taxpayers millions and ultimately relied on district maps that had been both widely criticized and rejected by the highest court in the state.
“Politicians are essentially choosing their voters,” local resident Rebecca Mark told the News; Mark has also been working this year to support Citizens Not Politicians, collecting signatures to ensure Issue 1 was placed on the ballot. “They are looking at the past voting records of people in this area, and they are choosing their voters, which is why the districts became so oddly shaped.”
For proponents of Issue 1, the common denominator in the continued presence of gerrymandering in Ohio is clear: the influence of politicians.
“Politicians just can’t seem to help themselves,” Dodson told the News last month. “They are going to grab power wherever they can.”
So Issue 1 aims to remove politicians from the redistricting process, instead creating a citizen-led redistricting commission.
If Issue 1 is passed, the selection of a new Citizens Redistricting Commission will begin with the Ohio Ballot Board. The partisan members of that board will select 16 retired Ohio partisan judges — eight Republicans, eight Democrats. From that pool, the Republicans on the Ohio Ballot Board will select two Democrat judges, and the Democrat members of the board will select two Republican judges. These four judges will form the Bipartisan Screening Panel, or BSP, which will begin selecting citizen applicants to become part of the new Citizens Redistricting Commission.
Supporters of Issue 1 have pointed to this part of the proposed plan — Republicans picking Democrat representatives, and vice versa — as being uniquely bipartisan.
“Have you ever heard of the ‘cut the cake’ problem?” Dodson said. “You have one piece of cake and two screaming kids; you point at one kid and say, ‘You cut the cake,’ then you point at the other kid and say, ‘You pick who gets which slice.’ Then you walk out of the room.”
The BSP will ultimately select six citizen applicants — two Republicans, two Democrats, two Independents. Those six members of the Citizens Redistricting Commission will select the remaining nine members, for a total of 15 members — five Republicans, five Democrats and five Independents.
Importantly to supporters of Issue 1, no politicians will be involved in either the selection process or the commission itself.
“To a certain extent, this idea of a citizen’s commission would be taking back the power to where it was intended to be in the first place,” Mark said. “This is self-government, where we want to elect people who represent us and who do good things.”
In addition to the creation of the commission, Issue 1 aims to “require fair and impartial districts by making it unconstitutional to draw voting districts that discriminate against or favor any political party or individual politician” and “require the commission to operate under an open and independent process,” according to the Citizens Not Politicians website.
Issue 1 is supported by the Ohio Democratic Party, the League of Women Voters, Ohio Conference NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio and a number of labor unions, including the Ohio Association of Professional Firefighters and Communication Workers of America.
But importantly, both Dodson and Mark told the News, placing the issue on the ballot seemed to receive broad support from citizens around the state as they collected signatures this year; 731,306 signatures from every county in the state were collected in total.
“We expected Democrats to be supportive, but we also had people in full MAGA regalia who were very much for it — some of whom went and rounded up more of their friends to come and sign,” Dodson said.
“The bottom line is people don’t like the idea that their voice is being taken away from them,” Mark said.
Issue 1 has received pushback, however, from the Ohio Republican Party and, notably, Gov. Mike DeWine; the governor stated in a press conference in July that he opposes the ballot initiative.
Though DeWine stated during that press conference that the state’s current redistricting procedure “simply does not work very well,” and that the only way to put an end to gerrymandering is to “take politics completely out of the drawing of maps,” he said he believes Issue 1 would “compel map drawers to produce gerrymandered districts.”
DeWine’s concern, as he stated later in the press conference, was that the Citizens Redistricting Commission would still be influenced by past voting data in drawing maps. He said he prefers an approach closer to that of Iowa’s redistricting process, in which partisan data isn’t considered and maps are drawn by nonpartisan legislators.
But redistricting experts seem to agree with Issue 1 supporters that politicians — partisan on paper or not — are still the number-one roadblock to ending gerrymandering.
Sam Wang, of the nonpartisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project, told the Statehouse News Bureau last month that the temptation for politicians is “overwhelmingly to self-deal.”
“The Ohio plan that’s on the ballot this November comes the closest to being a silver bullet to getting to fair districting,” Wang said.
Nevertheless, the ballot language for Issue 1 itself seems postured to lead voters to believe that the amendment’s passage would lead to further gerrymandering; the ballot language reads that Issue 1 would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering approved … [in] 2014 and 2018” and “establish a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor either of the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio, according to a formula based on partisan outcomes as the dominant factor.”
Despite the confusing ballot language, the proposed amendment does not support gerrymandering. Citizens Not Politicians sued over the ballot language, citing it as misleading to voters. The Ohio Supreme Court voted 4–3 in September to make minor changes to the ballot language, but preserved the vast majority of the language as originally written. Following the ruling, the Ohio Supreme Court’s Democrat justices lambasted the decision.
Local supporters of Issue 1 said they hope Ohio voters would look to similar citizen-led redistricting commissions in other states and make up their own minds, irrespective of the ballot language.
“If you look at the way the districts are in Michigan, they have a Citizens Redistricting Commission, and their districts look a lot more reasonable than ours do,” Mark said.
“I’m hoping we can get enough of a word out,” Dodson added. “Because the people of Ohio are smarter than that.”
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