Gov. Mike DeWine (Photo by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal / Republish photo only with original story)

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine still thinks the state’s redistricting process would benefit from changes, and he plans to push the legislature to move forward with a plan similar to the one used by Iowa, where nonpartisan staff draw lines but maps are approved by lawmakers.

In comments made to reporters on Thursday, DeWine maintained an opinion he brought up first in July when he publicly opposed the redistricting reform in the general election’s Issue 1: the current system isn’t working, and the system being used in Iowa would bring necessary changes.

“It seems to me that it’s very appropriate for the legislature to start looking at this again,” DeWine said at a breakfast for the Ohio Legislative Correspondents Association.

The current method

DeWine was a part of the Ohio Redistricting Commission as it currently stands, one of five Republican elected officials on the commission, along with two Democratic elected officials.

During his time on the Commission, the group adopted six versions of Statehouse district maps and two congressional district maps. Five of the Statehouse maps were deemed unconstitutionally partisan by the Ohio Supreme Court, and both congressional district maps were rejected by the court for the same reason.

The sixth version of Statehouse maps was the only to be approved with bipartisan support, a move that Democrats on the commission said was made to get the mapmaking process out of the hands of the commission and to avoid Republicans drawing even more gerrymandered maps and passing them on a party-line vote.

The bipartisan support was the reason cited by the Ohio Supreme Court when they upheld the map in a court challenge.

The commission’s makeup and methods were criticized for most of the more than two years it spent drawing up maps, with voting rights advocacy groups and hundreds of other Ohioans speaking out in public hearings about a lack of transparency in the mapmaking process and a lack of accountability from the commissioners, even after state supreme court justices pondered holding them in contempt for missing deadlines and not listening to court orders.

Commission leaders and members pushed back against court orders and deadlines, publicly questioning the authority of the court in redistricting and dismissing the concept of deadlines.

ORC member and incoming House Speaker Matt Huffman even took Ohio’s redistricting troubles to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking them to rule on a century-old legal theory that argued any authority related to elections, including redistricting, falls to the legislature. The effort was rebuffed by the nation’s highest court.

Issue 1

After watching the redistricting commission stumble toward resolution, voting rights advocates and the former chief justice who’d served as the swing vote that led to the rejection of so many of the commission’s maps had seen enough.

Citizens Not Politicians was created in an effort to rewrite the Ohio Constitution’s provisions on redistricting (established in two other ballot initiatives in 2015 and 2018), taking the commission out of play, and aiming to institute an independent, citizen-led commission selected by judges and made up of an equal number of Republicans, Democrats and independent Ohioans.

The campaign garnered well over the number of signatures needed to put an amendment proposal on the ballot last November, but also stirred up opposition from some of Ohio’s highest leaders, including DeWine, Huffman and Secretary of State Frank LaRose, also a member of the Ohio Redistricting Commission.

After a fraught and expensive campaign, a majority of Ohioans voted to keep the current system in place, rejecting the proposal with nearly 55% of the vote. Citizens Not Politicians leaders theorized that some of the Ohioans who voted “no” were confused enough about the issue that they believed they were voting in favor of the citizen-led commission.

This was after Republicans on the Ohio Ballot Board placed a summary of the amendment on the ballot for voters that claimed the amendment would require gerrymandering.

The future of redistricting in Ohio

Having watched yet another ballot initiative pass by, DeWine would rather see the next changes done in a legislative fashion.

“I think the advantage of doing it by the legislature instead of putting something on the ballot is that you have an opportunity to come in and testify in front of the legislature,” DeWine said.

That legislative change, in his mind, should be modeled after the redistricting process being used in Iowa, a process that has been in effect for four decades, but not without revision.

When DeWine first brought up the Iowa plan, he pledged to push the Ohio General Assembly on it whether or not Issue 1 passed in November.

His argument for the plan is based mostly on the fact that mapmakers are “prohibited from looking at past voting patterns, they’re prohibited from looking at voter registration,” he told reporters on Thursday.

“It seems to me (the Iowa plan) takes politics out of it,” DeWine said. “It also puts a premium on putting political subdivisions together.”

The Iowa process uses a nonpartisan agency of their General Assembly, similar to Ohio’s Legislative Service Commission, as the drawers of the maps, which would then move on for legislative and gubernatorial approval, according to a legislative guide on the Iowa plan.

After a map is given to the General Assembly, a minimum of three hearings in different areas of the state would be required, and a report on the hearings would also be required.

A map that doesn’t receive approval needs to come with specific reasons for the rejection, and the nonpartisan agency is given 35 days to revise or replace the plan. A second plan isn’t required to receive public hearings, and if a third plan is needed, changes can be directly made by lawmakers, under the Iowa rules.

Judicial intervention would be invoked if a third plan isn’t agreed to, or if legal challenges arise, with the state supreme court named as the authority on map validity.

While DeWine touts the longevity of the Iowa plan, he said he’s not “locked in to every word” and he recognizes that other than the number of letters in their name, Iowa and Ohio are very different states.

“I would hope that (the Ohio legislature) would start there and have the public discussion, and people would come in and say they like it, they don’t like it, here’s what they want them to change,” DeWine said. “But the legislature needs to start on this.”

He’s not worried about motivation being a factor for the GOP supermajority who are largely protected under the current maps, and stand as the majority on the Ohio Redistricting Commission, should it stay in place.

“Somebody’s always going to have the majority I guess,” DeWine said. “But eventually these things do change.”