The Ohio Board of Elections was sued this week over certain “misleading and unconstitutional” language on ballots.
On Tuesday, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the Citizens Not Politicians campaign filed a lawsuit against the Ohio Ballot Board, demanding that the state Supreme Court order a ballot redistricting order. The lawsuit argues that the wording on the ballots for redistricting is “possibly the most biased, inaccurate, misleading and unconstitutional” the state has ever seen.
The lawsuit was filed against the state’s election board, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, Ohio’s election commissioner and the board’s chairman.
“This Court’s intervention is necessary to ensure that Ohio voters are provided with the truthful and impartial ballot titles and ballot language required by law so that they can exercise their right to decide for themselves whether to amend the Ohio Constitution,” Citizens Not Politicians’ lawsuit said.
The lawsuit seeks to challenge an amendment that would change Ohio’s political mapping system. Ohio’s current mapping system created a congressional map and seven House seats that were deemed unconstitutionally gerrymandered because they favored Republicans in the state.
AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth/AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth
The proposal would restructure the current redistricting commission, which consists of four representatives, the governor, the auditor and the secretary of state, and replace it with a 15-member citizen-led panel of Republicans, Democrats and independents, with members selected by retired judges.
Last week, the Ohio Ballot Board approved the language in the amendment that sparked the Citizens Not Politicians campaign’s lawsuit. The proposed constitutional amendment, which aims to “prohibit partisan gerrymandering,” would establish a 15-member Citizens’ Redistricting Commission “necessary to gerrymander Ohio’s electoral and congressional districts.”
In its lawsuit, Citizens Not Politicians argues that the approved ballot language is “completely backwards” and claims its proposal aims to prohibit partisan gerrymandering of the maps. The lawsuit says the plan ensures that the commission’s maps reflect the partisan preferences of Ohioans across the state while creating geographically contiguous districts that represent communities of interest.
However, Ohio Republican Senator Theresa Gavarone argued that the wording of the proposed amendment conforms to the definition of “gerrymander” found in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Redistricting is the process of redrawing states’ electoral districts to reflect updated population data from the U.S. census, which is conducted every 10 years. Gerrymandering is the manipulation of electoral district boundaries in favor of a particular political party or group.
Citizens Not Politicians’ lawsuit argues that the gerrymandering language and many other words in the ballot description violate the Ohio Constitution.
“Every single paragraph on the ballot contains misleading and biased language designed to further incite voters against the amendment,” the lawsuit states.
After the Elections Committee meeting on Friday, neither LaRose nor Gavarone spoke to reporters. Instead, they recorded a 35-minute podcast with John Fortney, communications director for Ohio Republican Senate President Matt Huffman, in which they defended the committee’s actions and criticized the fall proposal — titled “Political Results Before People” — as undemocratic, too far-reaching and impractical.
