“We are tired of listening to self-serving politicians telling us how they want to keep rigging the game,” former Ohio Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor said of DeWine’s campaign against the ballot question.
Citizens Not Politicians submits signatures for ballot initiative
Citizens Not Politicians submits signatures for initiative against gerrymandering in Ohio. With 731,000 signatures, supporters expect the initiative to be on the ballot
Ohio and Iowa have all sorts of interests, from corn and soybeans to Big Ten football and Midwestern slang, but should they share a common model for redistricting Congress and state legislatures?
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine wants voters to reject a new proposal on the November ballot to replace political mapmakers with a 15-member citizens’ commission to redistrict. Instead, the Republican governor urged lawmakers to adopt the Iowa model.
However, the Citizens Not Politicians campaign argues that Ohio is not Iowa. The Buckeye State has more than 3.5 times the population, includes several more large cities, is home to 12 times more black residents and is not shaped like a rectangle with counties arranged on a grid.
Geography and demographics aside, Republicans in Ohio place more emphasis on gerrymandering districts in favor of their candidates than their opponents in Iowa, say supporters of the proposed change.
“Governor DeWine has voted with his fellow politicians seven times for unconstitutional maps and now says what Ohio really needs is what he calls the ‘Iowa Plan,’ a system where the governor and other politicians have the final say on the maps,” said former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican who helped draft the citizens’ plan for redistricting. “We are tired of self-serving politicians telling us how they want to continue to rig the game.”
What is the Iowa Model?
How does Iowa draw maps? Iowa’s Legislative Services Agency, a nonpartisan group charged with analyzing the legal and fiscal impacts of proposed legislation, draws maps for Congress and the state legislature using criteria set forth in state law.
A five-member commission, four of which are chosen by the top Republicans and Democrats in the legislature, advises the LSA on the design of the maps. Under Iowa law, the cartographers are not allowed to take into account the residence of incumbent legislators or political data such as the number of Republicans in an area. They are not allowed to draw districts that favor one party, incumbent or candidate.
After the LSA draws the maps, the Iowa Legislature must approve or reject them. Republicans have a majority in both chambers and a veto-proof majority in the Iowa Senate. (In Ohio, the GOP has a two-thirds majority in both chambers of the legislature.)
If legislators reject the maps, the Iowa LSA creates new ones to address the legislators’ concerns. If the Iowa Legislature rejects three maps, legislators can take over the process and create their own. But Iowa lawmakers have never done that since the model was introduced in 1980. The governor, currently Republican Kim Reynolds, must sign any approved maps into law.
Iowa’s current congressional map includes two Republican-favoring districts and two contested seats, a ratio that reflects the state’s voters choosing former President Donald Trump over President Joe Biden in 2020 by a 54% to 45% margin.
“We have a model that has worked in Iowa since about 1980,” said Terese Grant, co-president of the League of Women Voters of Iowa. “But that doesn’t mean that this process would work everywhere.”
Iowa lawmakers were not tempted to reject the LSA maps and instead create their own. “If they rejected it (the map), I think there would be such an outcry in this state that they don’t want to go there.”
Would the Iowa model work in Ohio?
DeWine says Iowa’s model could work in Ohio.
“The only way to do that is to keep politics out of map-making entirely,” DeWine said, referring to Iowa’s criteria for ignoring political data. “Ohio should have a constitutional provision directing map-makers to disregard past election data that map-makers know will lead to a predetermined partisan outcome.”
But Iowa’s model keeps politicians locked into the redistricting process – something DeWine said he wants to do away with. When asked about it, DeWine said he’s open to having someone else draw or approve the maps.
“Who draws the map is, frankly, not nearly as important as the criteria enshrined in the Constitution that they must follow, whoever the mapmaker is,” DeWine said.
But advocates of redistricting reform in Ohio say it’s ridiculous to assume that Ohio politicians would show the same reluctance as Iowa lawmakers. Ohio’s Republican-dominated mapping commission has missed deadlines, ignored orders from the Ohio Supreme Court and approved several maps without the support of Democrats on the panel.
“Gerrymandering doesn’t happen the same everywhere,” said Yurij Rudensky, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which supports the Ohio change. “Ultimately, the Iowa model of giving the legislature the ability to do what it wants and giving the governor the ability to engage in redistricting would not be appropriate for a state like Ohio, which has been among the most gerrymandered states in the country for decades.”
Jessie Balmert is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which covers the Columbus Dispatch, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio..
