On Friday, the Ohio State Supreme Court announced its decision to invalidate the Republican-drawn 2021 congressional map, explaining that it “stacks the deck” against the opposite party.
Voters in 2018 amended the state’s constitution to prohibit excessive partisan map-drawing and the court concluded that the new map was a product of just that. Read the opinion and excerpts below.
The now invalidated map had failed to pass the legislature by a supermajority vote and thus under the constitution, it would have only been in effect for 4 years. With the court’s ruling on Friday, the legislature will have 30 days to agree on a new map. If the legislature deadlocks, the Ohio Redistricting Commission – a smaller group of lawmakers and state officials – will have 30 days to redraw the map.
“Expert analysis demonstrates that in each of Ohio’s three largest metropolitan areas, the enacted plan contains districts that are not shaped according to Article XIX’s neutral districting criteria or Ohio’s political geography; instead, the inescapable conclusion is that they are the product of an effort to pack and crack Democratic voters, which results in more safe Republican districts or competitive districts favoring the Republican Party’s candidates. Not only are such oddly shaped districts not required by the criteria set forth in Article XIX, but they are in tension,if not in conflict, with Section 1(C)(3)(c)’s exhortation that the General Assembly “shall attempt to draw districts that are compact.”
The incontrovertible evidence in these cases establishes that the plan passed by the General Assembly fails to honor the constitutional process set out in Article XIX to reapportion Ohio’s congressional districts. The General Assembly produced a plan that is infused with undue partisan bias and that is incomprehensibly more extremely biased than the 2011 plan that it replaced.
