Signature-gathering starts anew for mapmaking proposal in Ohio that was stalled by a typo

Columbus, Ohio — Backers of a proposal to reform Ohio’s troubled political map-making system will finally be able to start collecting signatures after passing a second round of state approvals on Monday.

Citizens Not Politicians now has until July 3 to collect approximately 414,000 signatures needed to submit the constitutional amendment to voters in November 2024. Supporters are expected to spread across the state early this week to try to hold the statewide vote next fall.

Their proposal would replace the current Ohio Redistricting Commission, made up of three officeholders and four state legislators, with an independent body elected directly by citizens. The members of the new panel would be diversified by party affiliation and geography.

The effort has been repeatedly delayed. It started with two initial rounds of objections to their petition language by Republican Attorney General Dave Yost before the wording was initially certified. The Ohio Ballot Board then unanimously approved the measure in October, after which organizers discovered they had made a single-digit typo in a date.

The error sent the process back to the drawing board: first back through Yost’s office; and then back through the ballot box, which reapproved the measure as a single issue on Monday.

The campaign said proponents of redistricting reform are eager to get started circulating petitions. Among them is Nadia Zaiem, from the Cleveland suburb of Westlake, who says she’s motivated to see a new way to draw Ohio’s legislative and congressional maps.

She said the current system allows politicians of both parties to “ignore the will of their voters, knowing that they will continue to be elected and re-elected not because they have earned the support of a majority of voters, but because they manipulated rules’. system in their favor.”

The effort follows the repeated inability of the existing structure to produce constitutional maps. During the lengthy process for redrawing district boundaries to take into account the results of the 2020 Census, challenges filed in court resulted in two congressional maps and five sets of Statehouse maps being rejected for being unconstitutionally gerrymandered.