COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Republican Ohio legislative leaders said Wednesday they are abandoning a plan to ask voters to alter the deadlines in the state constitution that lawmakers must follow when redrawing the political maps for state legislative districts.
Senate President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, had proposed pushing back the deadlines in the state constitution, which would have required voter approval, in what he said was a response to the delayed completion of the U.S. Census.
Lawmakers use Census data as the foundation for drawing political maps in a process that’s called redistricting. Sending a constitutional amendment to voters in August, as Huffman had proposed, would have required a vote from 60% of the Ohio House and Senate on Wednesday.
But Huffman told reporters Wednesday that it would be a “fool’s errand” to attempt to put the issue on the statewide ballot this summer, as such measures don’t usually pass unless they have bipartisan support and there’s “heavy spending” on ads to win over voters.
Legislative Democratic leaders have criticized Huffman’s proposal, expressing concerns that the process to amend the constitution seemed rushed and possibly prone to unintended consequences that could be difficult to fix. Ohio House Minority Leader Emilia Sykes of Akron and Ohio Senate Minority Leader Kenny Yuko of Richmond Heights also cited concerns from voter-rights advocates, who have said they felt it could be used to create a less transparent process.
“Discussions continued during the weekend but ultimately we felt that there wasn’t enough time to fully vet a constitutional amendment and to build consensus among the redistricting advocacy groups that were instrumental in the passage of the two reforms in 2015 and 2018,” said Giulia Cambieri, a spokeswoman for Yuko.
State officials said they aren’t expecting the census data until mid-August or September.
Meanwhile, the first deadlines for drawing state legislative districts in Ohio’s new redistricting system fall on Sept. 1 and Sept. 15. After those deadlines, Republicans on the seven-member commission will no longer have to get support from the commission’s two Democrats. The catch is, though, that they could only pass maps that last for four years, instead of 10-year maps under the earlier deadlines.
Democrats have proposed asking the Ohio Supreme Court to grant state officials an extension for this year’s redistricting process, as some other states have done, including Michigan. Huffman, an attorney, has questioned whether that will work, and pitched his plan as a way to ensure Democrats have a chance to participate in the creation of 10-year state legislative maps.
There is a separate process for redrawing Ohio’s congressional lines with its own set of deadlines, with 10-year maps with bipartisan approval that can be approved as late as Nov. 30. Huffman had floated changing the congressional deadlines too, but said his main concern was with the deadlines for the state legislative lines.
Ohio’s new redistricting process, approved by voters for statehouse districts in 2015 and congressional districts in 2018, is meant to fight partisan gerrymandering by requiring greater minority party support and limiting how lawmakers can split cities and counties. The changes could give Democrats more representation in the General Assembly, despite Ohio’s drift to the political right, by making it harder for Republicans to recreate their current gerrymandered maps, which have awarded them a disproportionately large share of legislative and congressional seats since they went into effect in 2012.
Huffman said Wednesday that if the redistricting commission gets census data by Sept. 1, it could still approve a map by Sept. 15 -- though he said commissioners would have to approve in “a bit of a hurried way,” and having to rush like that makes the process “a lot more difficult.”
If the redistricting process happens in such a way, Huffman said critics will likely file a lawsuit with the Ohio Supreme Court claiming it’s unconstitutional.
Some voting-rights groups, including the League of Women Voters of Ohio, have proposed pushing back Ohio’s 2022 primary election, currently set for May 3. But Huffman said doing so wouldn’t solve the redistricting time crunch looming this September.
“I don’t know what delaying the primary solves,” he said.
Cleveland.com politics reporter Jeremy Pelzer contributed to this story.