The worst nightmare of the Ohio General Assembly’s Republican supermajority arrived on the loading dock of Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s Columbus office Monday afternoon.
They were rented trucks, loaded to the gills with boxes full of petitions — petitions which could, in November, open the door to ending the GOP’s decades-long hold on how legislative districts are drawn.
delivering signatures to the Secretary of State’s office means some manual labor. here’s a Franklin County load from Citizens Not Politicians, delivered by U-Haul and about to be unloaded.
— Sarah Donaldson (@SarahEDon) July 1, 2024
the anti-gerrymandering coalition says it has 730,000+ signatures for delivery today pic.twitter.com/VHZ8eiB9Zf
The petitions contain 731,306 signatures, gathered throughout all of Ohio by an army of volunteers who have been roaming the streets of Ohio’s small towns and big cities for months now.
If you’ve been out and about in public this spring and summer, it is likely you have seen them — polite, earnest citizens asking you to sign in order to put an issue on the ballot that would take the redistricting process out of the hands of elected officials and into the hands of an independent commission.
RELATED: Ohio redistricting issue likely this fall as group turns in more signatures than needed
Their work is done, at least for now. Now it is up to LaRose’s office to check those petitions to see if 413,487 of them are the signatures of registered voters in Ohio.
Don’t bet against it.
Those people who volunteered for the Citizens Not Politicians petition drive did not work this hard just to come up short.
Monday, before the boxes were delivered to LaRose’s office, Citizens Not Politicians activists packed the Ohio Statehouse Atrium for a pep rally where the keynote speaker was former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Maureen O’Connor, their matron saint.
“Ladies and gentlemen, let me let you in on a little secret,” O’Connor told an enthusiastic crowd at the Statehouse Monday. “This amendment will pass. We will prevail.”
O’Connor, a Republican and former lieutenant governor, jumped into the cause with both feet after going through a year of frustration in 2022, when she was chief justice of an Ohio Supreme Court majority that rejected six different maps adopted by the Ohio Redistricting Commission, an intensely partisan group made up these days of five Republicans and two Democrats.
The chief justice sided with the three Democrats on the court, but the Republican majority, led by Senate President Matt Huffman, gamed the system long enough to get their way.
And O’Connor could not run for re-election that year because of Ohio’s judicial age limits law.
For O’Connor, it was a liberating experience in one way, because it freed her to join the movement to change Ohio’s redistricting system.
If approved by the voters, the amendment would replace the current Republican-driven commission with the Ohio Citizens Redistricting Commission, which would have 15 members — five Republicans, five Democrats, and five unaffiliated voters.
No elected official could serve on the commission.
From the archives: A timeline of Ohio's redistricting saga
That is the part that sticks in the craw of the Republican leadership in the legislature and guarantees that they and the special interests that support them will spend enormous amounts of money to defeat it.
Huffman, the Ohio Senate president, told the Ohio Statehouse News Bureau he believes taking politicians out of the process is a mistake.
“I think that people who are making important decisions like this ought to be elected officials who are accountable to the public,’’ said Huffman.
Republicans argue they should have a supermajority in the legislature because their candidates have won 88% of the statewide races since 1994, when they came to power in the Ohio General Assembly.
That is true. Democratic wins on the state level have been few and far between in the past 30 years.
But it still begs the question: how much power is too much?
In 2022, the battles in the Ohio Supreme Court over redistricting showed that the partisan split in Ohio is about 54% to 46% in favor of the Republicans.
But, today, in the 99-member Ohio House, the partisan make-up is 68% Republican. In the 33-member Ohio Senate, the GOP controls a whopping 79%.
Those are both veto-proof supermajorities. What that means is that, no matter who is governor, wielding the veto pen, the Republicans can do whatever they want whenever they want. No governor nor minority party can stand in their way.
ANALYSIS: Analysis: Will 2024 be the year Ohio's GOP loses its grip on redistricting?
If the Citizens Not Politicians constitutional amendment makes the ballot — and there is every reason to believe it will — the end result will almost certainly not be a complete flip of the Ohio legislature from red to blue, as it was in Michigan after voters there approved a similar measure.
But it would create more competitive districts, even in Ohio’s reddest counties. And that might mean the Republican edge in the legislature might dip under 60% and they would no longer be a supermajority.
Just a plain old majority.
And plain old majorities need to reach across the aisle for help now and then. Imagine that.
