Early voting is well underway and Election Day is closing in fast. So, for those voters who have not had the time – or the willpower – to dive into Issue 1 yet, Signal Statewide is offering this nonpartisan cheat sheet to supplement the more detailed Issue 1 explainers we have already published.
We hope you find it useful in making an informed decision, or, at least, a way to impress your friends when talking about the big issue on the Nov. 5 statewide ballot.
What is Issue 1 about?
It’s an amendment to the Ohio Constitution that would change the state’s system for drawing political district maps for Congress members and state lawmakers. Drawing maps is referred to as redistricting.
What is gerrymandering?
That’s a word that references how the process of map making can be manipulated to the benefit of one party. In short, the parties’ experts know how to study past elections to predict who voters may support in the future, among other tricks of the trade, to try to maximize their chances of winning.
Why should I care about any of this?
The fate of the world won’t change on Nov. 5th with the passage or failure of Issue 1. But Ohio must redraw its state legislative and congressional district lines at least every 10 years to reflect population changes. Issue 1 offers voters a chance to influence how the process unfolds, by backing or rejecting it.
If Issue 1 passes, the state’s legislative maps will be redrawn ahead of the 2026 elections, five years earlier than they would be if it fails, under the new rules. So will Ohio’s congressional maps, although they’re due for a redraw either way. That means you have a real hand in Ohio’s democracy.
How does redistricting work in Ohio now?
Currently, the Ohio Redistricting Commission is in charge of state legislative redistricting. Its members are seven elected officials: the state governor, the state auditor, the secretary of state and four state legislative leaders: two Democrats and two Republicans.
The rules for congressional redistricting are more complicated. They give both the redistricting commission and the state legislature chances to draw maps, with authority switching off if and when certain deadlines pass.
Who controls the redistricting process today?
Republicans do thanks to their success in the 2022 elections, in which they won all the state’s executive offices and 67% of state legislative seats.
That means Republicans can approve new maps with a party-line vote. Democrats could have more of a say if they have more electoral success in the future.
But the district maps have a quicker expiration date if they lack minority-party support. This is a rule included in reforms voters approved in 2015 and 2018 that was meant to promote bipartisan cooperation. The current state legislative maps got bipartisan support – although Democrats said their support was reluctant – while the current congressional maps did not.
How would redistricting work under Issue 1?
If approved, Issue 1 would replace the redistricting commission with a 15-member citizen’s commission. It would be made up of five Republicans, five Democrats and five politically unaffiliated voters. Certain types of people, including politicians, lobbyists and political operatives, as well as their immediate family members, would be barred from serving. That makes it indisputable that passing Issue 1 would prevent state lawmakers from having a direct say how their own districts are drawn.
Anything done by the redistricting commission, including approving maps, must get at least two votes from each of the three groups: Republicans, Democrats and independents.
The commissioners would be chosen through an open application process involving a search firm and a bipartisan panel of four retired judges choosing finalists. It would be guaranteed at least $7 million of state funding guaranteed, a number based off the amount the state spent on lawyers during the litigation-riddled round of redistricting ahead of the 2022 elections.
Who’s for it? Who’s against it?
Issue 1’s backers include the Ohio Democratic Party, organized labor groups and the League of Women Voters of Ohio. A key campaign spokesperson is Maureen O’Connor, a Republican who retired as chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court at the end of 2022. They say the reform will make Ohio more politically representative while taking redistricting power away from self-interested state lawmakers and other politicians.
Issue 1’s opponents include the Ohio Republican Party, former president Donald Trump, many prominent state Republican officials, business groups like the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and Ohio Right to Life. They view the reforms as likely to cost their seats and describe Issue 1 as a liberal power play.
Issue 1’s main financial backers include several deep-pocketed liberal dark-money groups and labor unions. The “no” campaign hasn’t yet disclosed its donors but has close ties to the state Republican Party and the Ohio Republican congressional delegation.
Is Ohio gerrymandered?
It depends exactly how you define gerrymandering. But Republicans, who drew the current district maps, hold an amount of congressional and state legislative seats that significantly exceeds their share of congressional and legislative votes. And the way the districts are designed is likely to keep them that way, unless political winds shift in the future.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal elections legal advocacy group that supports Issue 1, issued a report that says 9 million of the 13 million Ohioans live in a state legislative district where their state representative district isn’t in serious dispute, including 1.8 million in 14 districts that lack both a Democratic and Republican candidate.
What exactly do the election results show?
In the 2022 election, Republican congressional candidates in Ohio won 56% of all congressional votes, while Democratic congressional candidates won 44% of all votes, according to a Signal analysis of state voting results. Republican state senate candidates won 58% of all votes, while Republican House candidates won 59% of all votes.
But Republicans won 66% of Ohio’s congressional seats – 10 of 15.
And they won 67 of 99 House seats, or 67%. And they hold 26 of Ohio’s 33 state Senate districts, or 79%, although not all Senate districts were up for election in 2022. As a result, Republicans have a durable veto-proof supermajority in Columbus, which happens if they control more than 60% of the House and Senate.
The district-level performance for various Republican candidates offers an idea of the GOP floor, and controls for how some state legislative seats are uncontested or not up for grabs every election.
Then-President Donald Trump, while winning Ohio with 53% of the vote in 2020, would have won 61 state House districts (62%) and 21 (63%) state Senate districts in 2020 had they existed then. Gov. Mike DeWine got a whopping 62% of the vote in the 2022 election, which he won reelection in a historic landslide. He won 13 (87%) congressional districts, 79 (80%) House districts and 26 (79%) state Senate districts.
🗳️For more on this year’s November election, visit our Election Signals 2024 page.
Why does this happen?
On paper, the state House districts favor Republicans to win 60 of 99 (60%) state House seats, according to a compilation of recent election results by Dave’s Redistricting App, an open-source elections tool. But eight of the 39 Democratic-leaning House districts favor Democrats by less than two percentage points, compared to the same being true for just one Republican-leaning district. This means relatively small swings in vote percentage can disproportionately cause Democrats to lose seats in the House while insulating Republicans from a similar effect.
This is a big part why the Ohio Supreme Court rejected the state legislative maps as illegally gerrymandered in multiple rulings ahead of the 2022 election, although Republicans won a longer legal and political battle, and the court’s makeup changed following the election. The Republican chief justice who issued those rulings now is a key advocate for Issue 1.
Twenty-four of 33 state Senate districts meanwhile favor Republicans. Three Republican-held seats project as winnable for Democrats though, while the nine Democratic seats are safely Democratic. This means Republicans have a solid floor of 21 seats, or 64% of Senate districts.
And in Ohio’s congressional map, Republicans have a hard floor of 10 seats, while Democrats’ hard floor is just two seats anchored in Cleveland and Columbus. A third Democratic-leaning seat in the Cincinnati area is growing increasingly blue, although that didn’t stop DeWIne from winning it in 2022. The state’s two remaining seats are toss-ups.
Can Democrats just do better under the current maps?
It’s theoretically possible for Democrats to win majorities under the current maps. It just would take laboratory-perfect conditions.
Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown won with 53% of the vote in 2018. He would have won 53 Ohio House districts (52%) and 17 of 33 (52%) of state Senate districts had they existed back then. He also would have won nine (60%) of 15 congressional districts.
He enjoyed a historically unique set of advantages though: a national political climate favorable for Democrats, Brown’s familiarity among voters thanks to his more than 40 years in elected office and a Republican opponent, Jim Renacci, who struggled to raise money and campaign effectively.
A more realistically strong Democratic performance came the same year from Rich Cordray, who lost to DeWine with 47% of the vote in a tight race for governor. Cordray got within three percentage points of DeWine, but got nowhere close to winning a majority of state legislative districts.
Corday won 40 of the current House districts (40%), 12 state Senate districts (36%) and five (33%) congressional districts. DeWine conversely got 50% of the vote but won 59% of the state House districts, 63% of the Senate districts and 66% of congressional districts.
What would Issue 1 do about this?
Issue 1’s rules contain a big change about how districts are drawn. It approved it would require Ohio’s district maps to favor each party to win a share of seats that “closely corresponds” with their share of the statewide vote.
Issue 1 defines “closely corresponds” as plus or minus three percentage points from the statewide vote. That means Republicans likely would lose some safe seats and under recent election results, would be favored to win somewhere between 53% and 61% of seats. The state’s current rules have similar proportionality language but it’s written in a way that Republicans have argued in court makes it optional.
Republicans say following Issue 1’s mandatory proportionality rules would require “gerrymandering” – something they successfully got written into the ballot language – because mapmakers would have to join Democratic-leaning areas surrounding major cities with Republican-leaning ones in the outskirts.
There’s other language in Issue 1 that says the maps are forbidden to benefit either party. It also lacks explicit references to making districts competitive, so it’s not clear exactly how it might affect the issue described in the Brennan Center report.
I still don’t know if I should vote yes or no. What should I do?
That’s up to you to decide. We’re not taking a position on Issue 1. We just want to make sure that you and other Ohio voters understand what’s in it.
