COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The Ohio Supreme Court should intervene on behalf of voters and order a rewrite of the ballots for a Restructuring measures in autumn This is “possibly the most biased, inaccurate, misleading and unconstitutional” the state has ever experienced, according to a lawsuit filed late Monday.
Citizens Not Politicians, the campaign for Issue 1 in November, and two individuals brought the promised litigation against the Ohio Ballot Board and Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the state’s election director and chairman of the board.
“This Court’s intervention is necessary to ensure that Ohio voters are provided with the truthful and impartial ballot titles and language required by law so that they can exercise their right to decide for themselves whether to amend the Ohio Constitution,” the lawsuit states.
The amendment proposal, submitted by robust cross-party coalitioncalls for replacing the state’s problematic existing political map system, which produced seven sets of maps for the Statehouse and Congress that were declared unconstitutional in order to favor Ohio’s ruling Republicans. The existing redistricting commission – consisting of four representatives, the governor, the auditor and the secretary of state – would be replaced by a 15-member citizen-led commission of Republicans, Democrats and independents. Members would be selected by retired judges.
In this case, the issue is the wording on the ballot that the Elections Committee passed on a bipartisan basis on Friday. Among other things, it describes the proposed constitutional amendment to “prohibit partisan gerrymandering” as the creation of a 15-member Citizens’ Redistricting Commission that would be “mandated to gerrymander Ohio’s congressional and congressional districts.”
Republican Senator Theresa Gavarone, who made the request to add this particular phrase, said the context matches the definition of “gerrymander” in the Oxford English Dictionary.
In its lawsuit, Citizens Not Politicians claimed the approved ballot wording was “entirely wrong” because its proposal prohibits partisan gerrymandering of the maps. “This is accomplished by ensuring that the plans adopted by the Commission attempt to approximate the partisan preferences of Ohioans across the state, while drawing geographically contiguous districts that reflect communities of interest,” the lawsuit states.
Redistricting is the process of dividing a state into new districts for the purpose of holding elections, usually using updated population figures from the U.S. Census, which is conducted every ten years. Gerrymandering is defined as “manipulating the boundaries of a district to favor one party or class.”
The lawsuit alleges that the gerrymandering language and numerous other language included in the 900-word ballot description violate provisions of the Ohio Constitution that require language on the ballot to clearly state what is being proposed and prohibit language that could “mislead, deceive or defraud voters.”
Except for the change proposed by Gavarone, it was developed by LaRose and his staff in a process he described as careful and focused on accuracy and fairness.
The lawsuit calls this “an absolute barrage of falsehoods,” claiming that the language misdescribes the party affiliation requirements of commission members, falsely suggests that the amendment would limit the right of Ohio citizens to “freely express their public opinions,” and falsely claims that it would prohibit “any citizen” from filing suit against the plan “in any court of law.”
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“Every single paragraph on the ballot contains misleading and biased language designed to further alienate voters from the amendment,” it says.
The LaRose Board of Elections has recently been the subject of several lawsuits over the wording of its ballots, alleging that the wording was misleading or erroneous.
In August last year, the Republican-majority court declared part of the text invalid to describe a constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion and other forms of reproductive care – although it left much of the controversial language in place. During an unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign last year, LaRose announced that he consulted prominent anti-abortion groups when composing the language.
In June 2023 Judges ordered the Panel to present its description of a divisive August Constitutional amendment that would have made it more difficult to amend the Ohio Constitution.
Both LaRose and Gavarone left the election board on Friday without speaking to reporters, instead recording a 35-minute podcast with John Fortney, communications director for Ohio Republican Senate President Matt Huffman, in which they defended the election board’s actions and criticized the fall proposal – which they called “Political Results Before People” – as undemocratic, too sweeping and cumbersome.
Despite legal disputes, the 2022 elections in Ohio were held based on unconstitutional maps.
This year, Republicans won 10 of Ohio’s 15 congressional seats under the unconstitutional electoral system in the U.S. House of Representatives, even though Democrats achieved several notable victoriesThe controversial Statehouse maps revealed even bigger Republican supermajorities.
In the podcast, LaRose pointed to these election results as proof that the system works in Ohio.
“Listen, when the voters of Ohio created an overwhelming Republican majority in the House and an overwhelming Republican majority in the Senate and they gave all the offices in the state to Republicans, I think they’re trying to tell us something,” LaRose said on the show. “I think they’re trying to tell us that they prefer conservative policies and that’s the way they prefer us to operate.”
