Former Ohio Supreme Court justices lead redistricting reform effort against gerrymandering

Brown remembers stories of the former Senate president and House speaker meeting for a drink at the end of the day to discuss the happenings of the legislature.

“They talked about what they could get done, and they both understood that there was going to be compromise,” McGee Brown told the Capital Journal.

For McGee Brown, unless changes are made, those days are over.

She is a Columbus native who has spent her career in the law. She was the first Black woman elected to the Franklin County Common Pleas Court in 1992 and the first to sit on the state supreme court when she took the bench in 2011.

A graduate of Ohio University and Ohio State University, Brown has spent her whole life in the state.

“That’s what breaks my heart, I grew up in this state and I don’t even recognize it anymore,” McGee Brown said.

But in the last year, she’s taken on a new way to enact change in the state, in a bipartisan way much like the old days she remembers fondly. She and former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor — the longest-serving women elected statewide and the first woman to lead the state’s highest court, who also happens to be a registered Republican — are two leaders in the fight to reform redistricting in the state of Ohio with a new proposed ballot initiative.

“This whole focus on party over people and power over people, it’s not the way a democracy works,” O’Connor said.

The initiative to bring a redistricting commission made up of Ohio citizens, rather than elected officials, is currently in the phase of signature collection before its July 3 deadline to submit those signatures to the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office. The aim is to have the ballot measure to voters in the November general election.

O’Connor and McGee Brown, along with the team that brought the new measure, Citizens Not Politicians, are up against political forces like current Senate President Matt Huffman in the fight to reform the voting district map-drawing process for the third time since 2015.

Huffman was an architect for the current system, overseen by the Ohio Redistricting Commission, and made up of entirely elected officials. That system took the last two years to come up with the Statehouse and congressional maps that will be used in this year’s election. The Statehouse maps were drawn up in September of last year, and survived a court challenge due to the bipartisan agreement that led to the adoption of the maps. The current maps were the sixth attempt at constitutional maps by the commission.

As it stands now, the commission is made up of a 5-2 majority of Republicans, including the governor, auditor, and the state secretary of state. Two Democrats represent the minority party on the commission, and in voting for the Statehouse maps in September, Minority Leader Allison Russo said she was purely voting for the maps to get the process out of the hands of the ORC.

The congressional maps that are in place in Ohio are the same ones the Ohio Supreme Court found to be unconstitutional in July 2022, with no plan in sight to redraw them, though they need to be redrawn after this year’s general election. The current Ohio General Assembly was elected under Statehouse maps declared unconstitutional by a bipartisan Ohio Supreme Court majority five times. O’Connor was the swing vote on that majority before she was forced by law to retire due to age. A split federal court ruled Ohio would have to use the maps for the 2022 election regardless. They will be replaced in the 2024 election by the bipartisan-approved maps from September 2023.

McGee Brown and O’Connor think reforms to the process will bring about greater transparency with “televised” commission activities, and a process led by those not elected to their positions, bringing about a better product with greater representation.

Having redistricting that reflects the voting trends of the state can also help minority communities and women have their proper say in the state issues, the justices said.

“I think what (supermajority leadership) does is it skews the viewpoint of people who are entrusted to make laws for the entire state,” McGee Brown said. “If I’ve never had certain experiences, then it’s easy for me to ‘other’ those people, to overlook them, to not hear their voices.”

No matter the political party, the two former justices see a state with every position of power filled by the same party as a failure of democracy, because the decisions become about staying in power, rather than making change for the better.

“When you have someone like the president of the senate who boasts that we can pretty much do anything we want, and takes into consideration just the people that put them there, as opposed to everybody in the district, that’s not leadership and that’s not representation,” O’Connor said.

That kind of leadership can also bring about voter exhaustion, with a constituency that feels as though their vote doesn’t have the power it should have. But McGee Brown said Ohioans who feel as though voting may not matter with a supermajority controlling lawmaking in the state should just look to the last round of ballot initiatives.

“I point them back to August 8,” said McGee Brown, referencing the election in which a Republican-supported constitutional amendment to raise the threshold to amend the constitution overwhelmingly failed to garner voter support.

“You look at what the legislature tried to do there, because they thought nobody would be paying attention, and you heard the voters of this state speak,” McGee Brown said.

On the other hand, O’Connor looks at the reproductive rights amendment that passed in November 2023 with 57% of the vote, and the dismissive reaction from the GOP legislators who have introduced legislation that would undermine the language of the amendment. State Rep. Jennifer Gross, R-West Chester, has also made comments that she “will not swear allegiance” to the reproductive rights amendment in future oaths to uphold the state constitution.

“I would argue that Issue 1 was unconstitutional,” Gross said in a recent video posted to social media, further arguing that Article 1, Section 1 of the Ohio Constitution “says we will defend life.”

For O’Connor, seeing legislators look away from what was approved by voters “just makes our message that much more clear, and it resonates.”

“(Laws) are created and debated and passed in an echo chamber, and there is competition, especially since 2016, with who can be the most extreme,” O’Connor said.

As the justices move forward in their support of new redistricting methods, they hope to see a constituency that’s further galvanized by the actions of the legislature, and the lack of accountability that comes from a supermajority of any kind.

“It’s a shame that we have to get so angry, and feel so threatened, against our own representatives,” McGee Brown said.