Redistricting Update
Late Monday afternoon it became clear that the live-streamed mapmaking process was at risk of failing to produce a complete map in time for the Commission to adopt before the court-ordered midnight deadline. Recognizing that they needed a backup plan in order to adopt a map before the deadline and avoid another contempt threat from the Ohio Supreme Court, the Commission voted to authorize a parallel process that would adjust the previously adopted map to more closely comply with the Court’s ruling on competitive symmetry.
Because work on the backup plan only began a few hours before the deadline, it is no surprise that it incorporated only a small number of changes from the previous maps adopted on February 24th, which have been available for public review for more than a month. Changes were made in Franklin, Columbiana and Stark Counties to make some Democratic House and Senate districts less competitive. All of those changes were made on camera in the live-streamed redistricting workroom, and the independent mapmaker and several members of the Commission present in the room were consulted during that process.
When the Commission reconvened around 10:00 pm, the independent mapmaker still had not produced a complete draft of his proposal. He was still working to produce the very first draft of the Senate map which required changes to the House map to fix constitutional problems. Without a complete map produced by the independent mapmakers and with only minutes until the practical deadline for the Commission to vote in time for the mapping information to be transmitted to the Secretary of State in compliance with the court order, the Commission voted to adopt the backup plan.
Shortly after the Commission adopted the backup plan, and after the practical deadline had passed, the independent mapmaker completed his draft by solving the last constitutional problem he was aware of. He did not have time to double check the map for any other violations or technical errors before the Democratic members introduced that map before the Commission for consideration. As a tacit admission that they were introducing an unverified and incomplete first draft, the Democratic Commissioners made a paradoxical motion to adopt the map, but also to keep the Commission in session to continue drawing the map for up to four weeks. That motion failed.
In the aftermath of the Commission meeting’s conclusion, the Democrats have made several incendiary claims. They claimed that the independent maps were finished before the deadline but were blocked by Republicans. They claimed that the backup plan was drawn in secret, even advancing a conspiracy theory that one of the Senate staffers who was sick was in fact working on the map elsewhere. They claimed that the draft maps were verified to be complete and constitutional before they were introduced before the Commission for adoption. All of these claims are completely false.
Legal actions were filed on Tuesday challenging the Commission’s actions. We now begin the fourth Supreme Court review of a four-year General Assembly map passed by the Redistricting Commission.
On Wednesday, the federal court hearing the challenge from Republican voters trying to reinstate the May 3rd Primary for General Assembly races also reached a conclusion of sorts. The federal court did not issue a ruling, but stated that they would not order a unified May 3rd Primary Election, would not move the primary date for races other than the General Assembly, and would not choose a specific map while the state court process might still resolve that question independently. They are planning to reconvene on April 20th to discuss a General Assembly primary in early August, and they have asked parties to file arguments about continuing to use the current General Assembly maps that were drawn after the 2010 Census for that election.
