But the cast of characters who will steer the process got reshuffled last week, with two newcomers set to play influential roles. 

Meanwhile, the Republican chief justice who had sided with Democrats in last year’s gerrymandering cases exited the stage on Dec. 31. 

Some Democrats hope that they secured a new Republican ally—this time in the legislature, where Jason Stephens was unexpectedly elected Speaker thanks to a bipartisan coalition that included all House Democrats—and that this may mitigate the maps’ partisan bias upfront, before they reach judicial review. But once they do, the GOP’s odds of securing favorable rulings for its gerrymanders has shot up dramatically due to a new conservative justice. 

“I suspect the political tricks to undermine democracy will go the distance,” said Desiree Tims, the head of Innovation Ohio, a progressive organization that lobbies for fair maps and is part of Ohio’s Equal Districts coalition. “The redistricting process should unfold in a democratic way, which has not been our experience in Ohio.” 

Joe Deters, the new justice who shifts the high court to the right

Two days before Christmas, Republican Governor Mike DeWine filled a vacancy on Ohio’s supreme court by appointing Joe Deters, the tough-on-crime prosecutor of Hamilton County (Cincinnati) who is close to the state’s GOP power brokers. “Joe Deters has the right combination of experience, legal knowledge, and passion for public service that will serve the citizens of Ohio well,” DeWine said. Deters was sworn-in this past Saturday, just a week after Justice Maureen O’Connor, one of the court’s anti-gerrymandering crusaders, was forced to retire due to her age. 

The switch greatly alters the court’s ideological balance and likely flips it into a majority willing to uphold Republican gerrymanders.

“It suggests that the minority will become the majority, and there will not be the check on the mapmakers that there was during the 2021-2022 mapmaking,” said Catherine Turcer, who leads Common Cause Ohio, a voting rights organization, about Deters’s arrival on the court.

Katy Shanahan, who last year worked as the Ohio state director of All On the Line, an anti-gerrymandering group, agrees. “Now the state supreme court has an ultraconservative four to three majority, which to me signals that [Republicans] will get a greenlight on whatever they want to pass,” she said. 

O’Connor, a Republican, sided with the court’s three Democratic justices last year in a series of rulings that invalidated the congressional and legislative maps adopted by the GOP-controlled Ohio Redistricting Commission because they “unduly favored” the Republican Party in violation of the state constitution. The three other Republican justices voted to sustain the maps but they were on the losing side of the repeated 4-3 decisions. 

“When the dealer stacks the deck in advance, the house usually wins,” the majority wrote in January 2022, in the decision that struck down the GOP’s first congressional map. Over and over again after that—the court invalidated congressional and legislative maps in seven separate rulings between January and July—the justices faulted Republican map-drawing for packing Democratic voters into just a few districts while also cracking diverse urban areas to dilute their representation.

Still, Republican lawmakers ignored the court’s rulings and ran out the clock by passing an endless stream of gerrymanders; eventually, a federal court allowed a set of maps drawn by the GOP to be used in the 2022 midterms only, helping solidify Republican supermajorities. And with a new round of redistricting now looming, last year’s court majority has unraveled: O’Connor reached the mandatory retirement age, Republican incumbents swept November’s supreme court races, and DeWine added a political ally—Deters—to the court. 

Deters has no track record on matters that involve redistricting: He has worked as a prosecutor for much of the past forty years, with the exception of a brief, scandal-tarred stint as state Treasurer in the early 2000s. But many state observers told Bolts that they harbor little uncertainty over how Deters will approach those cases. 

That’s in part due to Deters’s personal proximity to Mike DeWine, the governor, and to Pat DeWine, the governor’s son and a justice on the state supreme court. Besides donating to the DeWines, Deters has exchanged favors with the family. In 2017, Pat DeWine asked Deters to give his college-aged son an internship in the prosecutor’s office and Deters obliged, as Cincinnati’s City Beat reported at the time. 

Deters and Pat DeWine faced ethics complaints and calls for investigation over this internship, but Deters defended the arrangement, insisting it was proper for him to do a favor for a friend.

Now, the two friends will sit on the supreme court together, called upon to decide the fate of initiatives that Mike DeWine is involved in. Last year, Pat DeWine voted to uphold the gerrymanders of Ohio’s redistricting commission, even though his father is a member of the panel, voted to approve the maps, and has said that he believes the maps passed constitutional muster; Pat DeWine rejected calls that he recuse himself from last year’s cases.

Critics of the state’s redistricting process say all of these intricate relationships will now affect the fate of upcoming legal disputes over district boundaries.

“Mike DeWine knows exactly who he’s appointing to that court. You’re not going to waste a political appointment, given the stakes of, among other things, the redistricting process to someone who you don’t know for sure how you think they should vote on those issues,” said Shanahan. “I think anyone suggesting otherwise doesn’t understand politics.” 

“Joe Deters will not be like Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor,” she added.

Deters’s record on criminal justice also reveals a very different outlook than O’Connor brought to the court. Last year, O’Connor sided with Democratic justices in a case that lightly reformed the state’s bail system but provoked fierce backlash from state Republicans. Deters responded by fueling a conservative counter-offensive against bail reform, which resulted in a constitutional amendment that expanded pretrial detention in November.

Deters has long cultivated this tough-on-crime persona, including on issues that the court will likely confront in the future, from calling a group of defendants in a 2015 case “soulless and unsalvageable” to staunchly championing the death penalty.  

“What we always hope for the courts is that party labels don’t matter, and that was certainly the case with Maureen O’Connor,” Turcer said. “But I think it’s very important that we be realistic about that as well.”

Jason Stephens, the new speaker who may introduce some uncertainty into redistricting 

Some Ohio politicians did defy partisan expectations last week just a few blocks from the supreme court, in the state capitol. 

Largely sidelined in recent years, Democrats injected themselves into legislative proceedings when their House members coalesced with a third of the GOP caucus to elect Stephens as state Speaker. Stephens defeated the candidate who was expected to prevail, a very conservative lawmaker selected by most of his fellow Republicans.

The shock result led some Democrats and some anti-gerrymandering advocates to speculate that it may herald an “honest effort to get bipartisan maps,” as The Columbus Dispatch reported last week. 

“We are certainly encouraged to see a speaker that was chosen by members of both parties, and we hope that that bipartisanship will continue in creating district plans that truly serve the people,” Jen Miller, head of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, told Bolts. 

But no concrete promise has been reported between Stephens and Democrats on redistricting or any other issue. Allison Russo, the chamber’s Minority Leader, did not reply to a request for comment on whether Stephens made any commitments in exchange for Democratic votes. 

Stephens’s office also did not reply to requests for an interview. 

The new Speaker himself has a broadly conservative record as a legislator, including supporting new restrictions on abortion and voting for a legislative package that restricted ballot access in December. That package, which was signed into law by Mike DeWine last week and has been strongly denounced by voting rights groups, restricts the availability of ballot drop boxes, eliminates a day of in-person early voting, and makes the state’s voter ID requirements more burdensome by disallowing some forms of identification, among other changes. 

A number of advocates interviewed by Bolts cautioned that they had no high hopes for Stephens’s leadership. Even if he were to be interested in toning down gerrymandering, they said, he has his work cut out for him given the recent records of Ohio’s other Republican officials.

“I’m cautiously pessimistic about a deal between the Ohio Democrats and Republicans,” said Tims. “The Republicans have shown us their hand every single time throughout the process. It has never been a fair shake.”

“It’s a little hard to not feel like we’re just in another Lucy and the football moment,” Shanahan said about Stephens securing a promotion thanks to Democrats. “I hope that we’re not, I hope Lucy does hold down that football…, I hope that what comes out of this is positive movement away from the fringe extremes that our state legislature has been residing in for years. I’m skeptical, but I hope to be proven wrong.”

The upcoming map-drawing will be handled by the redistricting commission, a panel made up of the governor, auditor, and secretary of state—all of whom are currently Republicans—plus four members that represent the four legislative leaders in each chamber. (The leaders typically serve on the commission themselves.) That means that, even if Stephens were to resist aggressive proposals, there would be four other Republicans on a seven-person body.

Those include Matt Huffman, the state Senate President who played a lead role in ramping up the scope of gerrymandering last year, and Frank LaRose, the secretary of state who last year floated impeaching O’Connor from the state supreme court over her redistricting rulings.

But Stephens is still in a position to at least change last year’s dynamic, if not soften the maps, if he so chooses.

Ohio’s outgoing Speaker Bob Cupp played a very aggressive role in 2022 in controlling the mapmaking and in boxing other officials out of much of the process; legislative leaders wield special influence, especially over how their own chamber’s lines are redrawn. Turcer, who described herself as “guardedly optimistic” about the new Speaker, also floated the possibility that Stephens may at least make the redistricting process more transparent. 

“This is a systemic problem”

Several Ohio advocates told Bolts that their strongest hope about Stephens was that his bipartisan win may at least kill a controversial change to the state’s referendum process—one that would make it harder to change the redistricting process in the first place.

Late last year, Republicans floated increasing the threshold of passage for citizen-initiated ballot measures from 50 to 60 percent. That would make it far harder for independent groups to secure wins over policies that the legislature fiercely opposes, such as abortion protections. The idea did not pass the legislature in late 2022, leaving a path—for now—for redistricting reform.

Miller of the League of Women Voters and Turcer of Common Cause Ohio each said that their groups were exploring how to champion a new citizen-initiated ballot measure in Ohio to implement an independent redistricting commission, like the ones used in Arizona and Michigan. But neither committed to a timeline for such a push. 

In 2015, voting rights groups championed an amendment that put in place the system in use now but Republicans weaponized it in ways that advocates say was unintended. One of the components of that reform was that a map would only be in place for four years, rather than the usual ten, if it failed to gather bipartisan support; it turned out that Republicans in passing their 2022 maps did not care about this constraint, which in fact only gave them the opportunity to refine their lines more frequently. As a result, and no matter what happens in the run-up to 2024, Ohio will yet again need to draw new maps in the lead-up to 2026.

“At some point, there’s an insanity in doing the same thing over and over again,” Turcer told Bolts. “It’s not a matter of new tools—community mapping, citizen engagement, all the different ways that voters can show how their district is manipulated. We’ve tried all that. At this point, we need to actually take the elected officials out of the equation and put this in the hands of an independent insulated citizens commission.”

Federal Democrats mulled institutional protections against gerrymandering when they controlled Congress in 2021 and 2022, but those did not pass due to several senators’ opposition to changing the U.S. Senate’s filibuster rules. “HR1 would have solved a lot of these problems,,” said Tims, referencing the federal legislation, “and because of that failure, voting rights and democracy continue to erode in statehouses across the country.”

“These folks are drunk on power, essentially,” Turcer said of politicians in charge of drawing the maps that keep them in power. “And what do you do with drunks? You take away their keys.”

The post In Ohio’s Redistricting Redo, a New Justice and a New Speaker Will Steer the Ship appeared first on Bolts.

Five supreme court seats are up for grabs this year across North Carolina and Ohio, and the results may once again open the gerrymandering floodgates in both states.

The rulings that struck down GOP gerrymanders in each state hang on narrow 4-3 majorities that are now highly vulnerable to flipping. To preserve the status quo, Democrats must sweep both seats on North Carolina’s ballot. In Ohio, they must win at least one of three races, possibly two. Republicans are jumping on the opportunity, in what is shaping to be a favorable cycle for them.

“We must focus on battleground state Supreme Court elections because so many redistricting fights are won and lost there,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie tweeted on Feb. 26, specifically naming North Carolina and Ohio. Christie is the co-chair of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, a group that aims to maximize the GOP’s redistricting advantage this decade.

Dee Duncan, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), a national group that aims to win state-level elections, said the RSLC would be “spending more on state court races in 2022 than ever before.” The RSLC spent more than $5 million on judicial races in 2019 and 2020 alone, according to a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice.

Democratic groups like the National Democratic Redistricting Foundation have also contributed money in judicial elections in recent years. But so far in Ohio, the GOP is far more mobilized. The three Republican candidates for the state’s high court have raised more than $1.1 million combined as of January, compared to the three Democrats raising under $190,000, six times less. The numbers were more equal in North Carolina, with a slight advantage for the Democratic candidates as of the end of 2021.

David Pepper, the former head of the Ohio Democratic Party, told Bolts that he thinks national Democratic leaders “should go all in to win these supreme court races.” 

During Pepper’s tenure as party head between 2015 and 2020, Ohio Democrats flipped three supreme court seats, and redistricting played a major role in their messaging. When Democrat Jennifer Brunner won a supreme court election in 2020, her campaign sent her supporters an email with the subject line, “It’s official – we broke gerrymandering in Ohio.”

Those wins gave Democrats three of the court’s seven seats. Republican Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, who had signaled her distaste for gerrymandering ten years ago, joined them in a string of rulings this year to make up a fragile majority that struck down the GOP-drawn maps.

“Gerrymandering is the antithetical perversion of representative democracy,” the court wrote. “When the dealer stacks the deck in advance, the house usually wins.” It ruled that the GOP-drawn maps did not conform to a constitutional amendment voters approved in 2015 to require fairer districts. Republicans on the Ohio Redistricting Commission have argued that the new constitutional standards of fairness are only “aspirational,” not mandatory, a claim that the court majority rejected.

But O’Connor, who is barred from running for re-election this year because of her age, won’t be on the court much longer. Her departure deprives Democrats of a rare Republican ally and forces them to win at least one of three seats on the ballot this year to compensate. 

“With the retirement of the Chief Justice, it is imperative that a fourth justice that believes strongly in democracy is elected,” Terri Jamison, a lower-court judge and one of the Democratic candidates for supreme court, says on her campaign website, explicitly referencing the redistricting rulings.

But the chief justice race is likely to produce a new Republican justice no matter who wins because of who jumped in the election on the Democratic side. The only Democratic contender is Brunner, who is a current associate justice; she will face another associate justice, Republican Sharon Kennedy. Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican who signed the state’s latest gerrymanders, is favored to win re-election, will probably replace whoever wins, so even if Brunner becomes chief justice, her current seat will likely flip into GOP hands. 

This means that, unless DeWine ends up appointing a Republican who bucks their party like O’Connor did, Democrats need to win one of the other two elections on the ballot in order to preserve the court’s latest redistricting rulings. Both involve ousting incumbents.

In addition to the open race for O’Connor’s seat, two Republican justices who opposed the court’s anti-gerrymandering rulings are up for re-election, Pat Fischer and Pat DeWine, the son of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Fischer now faces Jamison, and DeWine is challenged by Marilyn Zayas. (Neither Zayas or Jamison responded to requests for comment.)

Pepper says it nevertheless helps Democrats to have Brunner on the ballot, because she will boost the rest of her ticket. He argues that Brunner, who is a well-known former secretary of state, can appeal to moderate voters like O’Connor did. As partisan elections are often swept by one party, the idea goes, lifting the party’s fortunes in one race strengthens Democrats in the others. 

Ohio Republicans changed election rules last year to add candidates’ party on the general election ballot. In the past, partisanship was not included for judicial candidates, and Republicans, who were reeling from their losses in 2018 and 2020, thought that this helped Democrats prevail in this red-leaning state. 

In other states where courts have struck down GOP maps, Republicans are similarly looking to change election rules. The GOP cannot gain a majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court until 2025, for instance, but it is toying with a constitutional amendment that would change the way the state’s justices are selected.

In targeting the rules of judicial races, Republicans are borrowing from the North Carolina GOP’s playbook. Lawmakers there made supreme court elections partisan starting in 2018, and repeatedly tried to manipulate the electoral process. Despite the legislature’s efforts, Democrats have maintained a majority on the court for the last few years. 

The North Carolina Supreme Court split along party lines on redistricting this year. Four Democrats voted to strike down; three Republicans voted to uphold. But two of those Democratic seats are now up for grabs, and Republicans need to win just one to have a majority next year. (In 2020, they swept three elections in the state, winning one seat by only about 400 votes.) 

Republicans now have a shot at an open seat since Justice Robin Hudson, a Democrat, is retiring. Democrat Lucy Inman and Republican Richard Dietz, both lower-court judges, are facing off to replace her. In the second election, Democratic Justice Sam Ervin IV will face one of three Republicans—attorneys Trey Allen and Victoria Prince, and April Wood, a lower-court judge—who did not reply to requests for comment. 

In exchanges with Bolts, Dietz and Inman each declined to share their views on redistricting, saying they would not comment on possible future cases. Both campaigns have faulted the other party for politicizing judicial elections. 

Still, prominent North Carolina Republicans have signaled that they expect that a GOP supreme court majority would give them more leeway in upcoming years. 

“Just a reminder that whatever Congressional maps are used this year can be revised next (and every) year by @NCGOP General Assembly which may have a GOP Supreme Court Majority,” Dallas Woodhouse, the former executive director of the state Republican Party, tweeted on Feb. 4, the same day the state supreme court struck down his party’s maps.

Following that ruling, lawmakers drew new legislative districts, and the supreme court imposed a new congressional map drawn by a bipartisan panel of three experts, all former judges. The GOP’s original map, which was struck down by the supreme court, would have given the GOP 10 of the state’s 14 seats. The new map has at least six Democratic-leaning seats.

But this fairer congressional map will only be in place for one election. There will be another round of congressional redistricting after the midterms that will determine the fate of multiple U.S. House seats, and it’s the new state supreme court elected in 2022 that will review the new districts.

The new legislative districts are more likely to last, because the state constitution says they “shall remain unaltered” until the next census. To pull off mid-decade legislative redistricting, state lawmakers would have to convince the high court to circumvent that ban.

Continued fights over redistricting are also guaranteed in Ohio. That’s because, if maps fail to garner bipartisan support, they are only operative for four years. The GOP has pushed maps all on its own, though they are currently locked in a stalemate with the court, which sets up a next round by 2025-2026. The latest congressional map drawn by the GOP there gives the party at least 11 of 15 districts, and the high court is reviewing it.

Republicans have a plan even if they fail to secure more favorable judges in North Carolina and Ohio: get the U.S. Supreme Court to silence state courts.

They are invoking a theory known as the independent state legislature doctrine, which holds that state lawmakers have carte blanche on redistricting and other election-related matters, free from any judicial review. The U.S. Supreme Court has so far sidestepped the doctrine, but four of its conservative members have signaled they are open to it. 

Republicans say courts are the ones guilty of gerrymandering and of usurping the authority of lawmakers. The RSCL recently criticized Democrats for resorting “to state courts to change the rules,” and it vowed to “keep redistricting in the hands of the people.” But the state lawmakers of North Carolina and Ohio, who according to a growing number of conservatives should have sole discretion over redistricting, spent most of the last decade easily maintaining their majorities through heavily gerrymandered maps.

Kennedy, the Republican judge who could become Ohio’s chief justice in November, recently signaled conservatives’ determination to capture the court and undo its recent rulings. At a dinner hosted by a county Republican Party, she called redistricting “the fight of our life.”

The post Supreme Court Elections May Re-Open Gerrymandering Floodgates in Two Key States appeared first on Bolts.