June 17, 2024, 3:33 p.m.
When former Republican Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor retired from the Court at the end of 2022 after a record number of years in service to the Buckeye State, she didn’t waste time getting back to work.
O’Connor, now 72, began her career on the state’s highest court in 2003 and retired due to constitutionally mandated age limits as the longest-serving statewide elected woman in Ohio history. She led the fight against gerrymandering during her final year on the bench—ruling seven times that GOP-backed state legislative and congressional maps were unconstitutional. But after leaving the Court, her fight was only just beginning. After five long days of relaxation, O’Connor dove head-first into a nonpartisan, citizen-led initiative to overhaul the state’s redistricting process.
“I told people that I was going to take four months off and do absolutely nothing, because I've never done that in my adult life,” O’Connor said in an interview with National Journal. “I had my first redistricting meeting on January 5, and I retired on December 31. I did not get four months off to do absolutely nothing.”
O’Connor is part of the Citizens Not Politicians campaign, which is currently in the process of collecting over 413,487 valid signatures by July 3 to place a constitutional amendment on the November ballot.
The proposed amendment would replace the current redistricting commission, led by politicians, with a 15-member citizen-led commission. The body would be composed of five Democrats, five Republicans, and five independent citizens, who represent the geographic and demographic diversity of the state, and would prohibit any current or former or politicians, political party officials, or lobbyists from serving. In addition to the new makeup of the commission, the amendment also requires “fair and impartial” congressional and state legislative maps by making it unconstitutional to draw districts that would favor or discriminate against a political party or politician, and would require the citizen commission to operate under an “open and independent process” by holding public meetings and abiding by public-records laws. A similar system has been implemented in Michigan.
If the amendment makes the ballot, a vote this fall would mark the third time in nine years that Ohioans have amended the state’s redistricting process.
In 2015 and 2018, voters overwhelmingly approved two separate amendments that laid the groundwork for the current redistricting process for drawing state legislative and congressional lines. While the amendments were billed as bipartisan efforts to end partisan gerrymandering, the result was a process led by Republicans—the dominant party in the state.
The current seven-member redistricting commission is composed of the governor, the state auditor, the secretary of state, and the four General Assembly majority and minority leaders, or their designees. The current system was put to the test by the most recent redistricting process, which involved multiple drawings of both the legislative and congressional maps that were deemed unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court.
“The amendment’s fatal flaw was its lack of an enforcement mechanism. The GOP majority simply stuck by its map, ignored the court’s orders and waited for a change in the court’s composition, which happened in the November 2022 election,” Mike Curtin, a former Democratic state representative and publisher of The Columbus Dispatch, wrote in an April opinion piece.
Former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
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Former Democratic state Supreme Court Justice Yvette McGee Brown, who is also a part of Citizens Not Politicians, told National Journal that the amendment seeks to address the failures of past reforms.
"When the citizens of Ohio thought they had passed a constitutional amendment that would end gerrymandering, we saw the games that were played," McGee Brown said. "And ultimately, Ohio is currently under a map that was declared unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court.”
“We've also said that the two special masters have to be approved by a unanimous vote of the Ohio Supreme Court. We're not going to play party politics by having our majority of the Republican Supreme Court appoint special masters,” McGee Brown continued.
The campaign has drawn fire from critics who say that it is impossible to take politics out of the redistricting process and that the amendment is too complicated for voters to understand.
“There are lots of ways to make dinner, and everybody's going to have a different suggestion about how it gets cooked,” Ohio-based GOP strategist Mark Weaver told National Journal.
“Districting is always complicated. It's always political, no matter how it's done. But the purveyors of this particular proposal are suggesting that it's an easy fix to a hard problem. That's almost always going to be snake oil,” Weaver continued.
Supporters of the campaign, meanwhile, said that the precise language is an important distinction from past reforms that left too much room for interpretation, and thus overreach, from politicians.
“This is the age of misinformation. And believe me, they are misinforming on this,” O’Connor said.
Members of the campaign recently announced that they are confident that they will collect enough signatures by the July deadline. The campaign did not share the exact number of signatures collected at the time of publication.
If the amendment passes in November, work will get underway. Most immediately, the Ohio Ballot Board, a committee that is responsible for writing the official ballot language for questions submitted statewide in Ohio, will have to select a bipartisan panel of four retired judges by Jan. 1 so that the panel can begin to review applications for the citizen-led commission. The chosen commission will then be tasked with undergoing a highly involved process—which includes a minimum of five regional public meetings across the state before drawing begins and five regional hearings for feedback after draft districts have been produced—to draw maps for use in 2026. The map drawn by the commission will be in place until a new map is drawn after the 2030 census.
While the work of the commission will just be getting started if the amendment is passed, O’Connor said that for her, it’s a different story.
“Am I going to be involved with this after it passes? I have no plans to be. I really would like to legitimately have the title retired,” O’Connor said.
“I have had some great jobs.... But this will be the most important thing of my career that I've been involved with,” she said.
