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Back in July, pro-democracy do-gooders in Ohio managed to gather enough signatures to put a constitutional amendment on November’s ballot that would ban gerrymandering. Ohio remains one of the most obscenely gerrymandered states in the US, despite prior voter efforts — twice! — to rein in the gerrymandered Republican majority in the state Lege. The Republicans simply said fuck you to the voters and figured out ways to game the reforms and re-install unfair maps that favored Republicans. And to make matters worse, the US Supreme Court decided in 2019 to let states do partisan gerrymandering as much as they wanted, as long as the rigged maps didn’t blatantly discriminate on the basis of race. So far, the latter limit has held, at least for the time being.
But democracy fans persisted, and now the gerrymandering ban goes to voters in November as Issue 1. To ensure fair voting and equal representation, the job of drawing voting districts would be taken away from the state Legislature, where there’s a gerrymandered Republican majority, and give it to a 15-member commission made up of five Republicans, five Democrats, and five independents. And to keep things clean, no elected officials or lobbyists could serve on the commission, either. Members of the commission would be chosen by retired state judges.
Yes, here’s the “however” you were waiting for: On Monday, the Ohio state supreme court decided 4-to-3 to approve an astonishingly misleading description of Issue 1 on the state’s ballots. In reality, Issue 1 would abolish gerrymandering, but the biased language in the description will tell voters that it requires gerrymandering — which it definitely does not.
If that sounds like a judicial ratfuck to you, it should. It’s a nakedly partisan attempt by elected Republican justices to preserve the Republican gerrymander in the state Legislature, so it can keep creating gerrymandered electoral districts.
As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern explains, Issue 1 would require that the new redistricting commission
draw legislative and congressional maps that do not unduly favor one party over the other. These maps would prioritize proportionality, meaning that a party should win a number of seats roughly proportional to its statewide vote. So if Republican candidates win about 57 percent of votes, they should win about 57 percent of seats in the state Senate—not 79 percent of seats, as they did under the 2022 gerrymander.
Issue 1 also repeals the voter-passed 2015 and 2018 amendments that tried and failed to make the Legislature draw up fair maps.
There were only two itty-bitty flies in the reform ointment: rightwing MAGA shithead Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who leads the partisan “Ohio Ballot Board,” and the aforementioned Supreme Ratfuckers. LaRose, you’ll recall, is the hyperpartisan bastard who tried last year — in multiple ways! — to ratfuck the very process of how initiatives work in the state, by trying to raise the bar for initiatives to pass from a simple majority to a 60 percent supermajority. He even scheduled the vote on that amendment in the summer, when he thought fewer voters would turn out. Voters turned out anyway and smacked down the ratfuck, then passed the abortion amendment — and legalized weed while they were at it.
Not missing the opportunity to be a partisan hack, LaRose and the GOP-dominated board described Issue 1 in completely deceptive language, as Stern explains, claiming the measure
would create “a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts” to produce “partisan outcomes” (emphasis added). It also declares that the amendment would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering approved by nearly three-quarters of Ohio electors participating in the statewide elections of 2015 and 2018,” a gratuitous reference to the failed reforms of the previous decade.
The ballot description even puts a wholly negative spin on the new tripartisan commission, claiming the amendment would “eliminate the longstanding ability of Ohio citizens to hold their representatives accountable for establishing fair state legislative and congressional districts” — never mind that the gerrymander made actually sweeping Republicans out of office next to impossible.
Oh sure, Ohio’s constitution does technically bar biased language from ballot descriptions, prohibiting language that might “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters.” That didn’t stop the Republican majority on the state supreme court from upholding LaRose’s ballot descriptions, because the majority decides what’s biased and what isn’t, and the three justices who dissented, eloquently and at length, can go suck it because they lost.
Still, Justice Jennifer Brunner made perfectly clear in her dissent that the ballot language gives the okay to “a fraud upon the voters” by accusing the amendment of doing the exact opposite of what it really does. As Brunner explained,
By adding negative language that is not remotely close to the proposed amendment’s language, the ballot board crafted language to mislead voters into believing that there is something “bad” about the amendment—instead of omitting argumentative language and letting the voters make their decisions unfettered by the board’s proselytizing.
And now, with the US Supreme Court out of the business of ensuring fair elections, the matter presumably rests with Ohio voters and with the backers of the amendment, who will now have to educate voters to vote for what Issue 1 actually does, not what the lying ballot tells them it does. Fortunately, Ohio voters have by now seen through so much Republican dishonesty around elections that they are old hands at saying hell no to the lies and bullshit. We can only hope that this fuckery pisses them off enough that not only will they pass Measure 1, they’ll also follow the example of Wisconsin and elect a state supreme court majority that believes that the rule of law is not a plaything for ensuring Republican power. Democratic Justices Melody Stewart and Michael Donnelly are up for reelection, and if voters elect state appeals court Judge Lisa Forbes, the Democrats would then have a majority that won’t go deciding that banning gerrymandering is a kind of gerrymander. For that matter, they might even go so far as to rule that “boneless” chicken wings can’t have bones in them.
PREVIOUSLY!
[Slate / David Pepper on Substack]
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