Most of the challenges are 1965 Voter Rights Act Section 2 claims relating to “racial gerrymandering” in either “cracking” minority communities into multiple districts or “packing” them into one district. The Ohio suits mostly alleged “cracking” and “packing” by Republicans was simple, but nevertheless illegal, political gamesmanship.
The legislative districts adopted by the seven-member Ohio Redistricting Commission in 2021 and signed into law that November by Gov. Mike DeWine drew lawsuits from numerous groups claiming they were unfairly gerrymandered by GOP leaders.
Among them was Neiman v LaRose, filed March 21, 2022, on behalf of Meryl Neiman and 11 other individual Ohio voters by Columbus attorney Donald McTigue with support from two high-powered, Washington-based law firms affiliated with the Democrat party.
Assisting in Neiman were attorneys from the Elias Law Group headed by Marc Elias, an elections law litigator affiliated with the Democratic National Committee, and from Covington & Burling, where former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder leads a “gerrymandering reform” practice in association with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
The gaggle of challenges was consolidated into Neiman and heard before the Ohio Supreme Court on July 19, 2022, which agreed that the state’s congressional district map, even after failings were allegedly addressed in a “March 2, 2022 Plan,” was still rigged to unfairly handicap Democrat candidates and, therefore, still unconstitutional.
The court ordered Ohio lawmakers or the commission to redraw a new state congressional district map for the 2024 election cycle in a partisan 4-3 decision opposed by the bench’s three Republican justices.
Subsequent maps were also rejected in the same 4-3 votes, with critics contending the Ohio Redistricting Commission, which includes the Governor, State Auditor, Secretary of State, one member nominated by the House Speaker, one nominated by the Senate President, and two nominated by minority chamber leaders, gives the GOP an unfair 5-2 mapping advantage.
In October 2022, Republican state house leaders petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Ohio Supreme Court’s ruling. On June 30, 2023, the Supreme Court vacated the ruling and remanded the case back to the Ohio Supreme Court.
Judicial Elections Have Consequences
In the year since the Supreme Court rejected successive maps submitted by the Ohio Redistricting Commission, the bench had changed.Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, a Republican with a swing vote history on redistricting rulings, including in 2022 challenges, had retired. With the November 2022 elections, Justice Sharon Kennedy, who had supported the maps, was elected chief justice.
Meanwhile, in September 2022, the ACLU Foundation of Ohio filed League of Women Voters of Ohio v Ohio Redistricting Commission on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Ohio (LWVO), the A. Phillip Randolph Institute of Ohio, and several individual voters challenging the maps for the state’s Congressional District 1 (CD 1) and CD 15.
The plaintiffs alleged the map “cracks” Democratic voters from multiple counties into CD 1 and CD 15 to make them more favorable to Republicans. It wanted the entire 15-district map tossed and re-charted.
In its Sept. 5 petition for dismissal, the LWVO said plaintiffs “no longer seek to pursue the relief requested in the complaint. In lieu of the continued turmoil brought about by cycles of redrawn maps and ensuing litigation, petitioners accede to the status quo of the ‘March 2, 2022 plan.’ That plan will provide Ohio voters with the certainty they deserve for the 2024 election cycle.”
According to the LWVO, the ‘March 2 Plan’ “partially remedied the undue partisan bias reflected in district lines used in some parts of the state … and the Court found it did cure the undue subdivision splits” in earlier map proposals, but that it “still reflected undue favoritism for the majority party.”
At the end of their four-page Sept. 5 petition for dismissal, Neiman plaintiffs said, “Given the ‘March 2 plan’ is, at least, a partial (Italicized in petition) remedy, and given the substantial costs and uncertainty that further litigation would entail, petitioners have decided to no longer pursue their challenge to the ‘March 2 plan.’”
With the Dec. 15 deadline for candidates seeking to run in the March 19, 2024 primary for office in the state’s 15 congressional districts, 33 state senate districts, and 99 state house districts approaching, plaintiffs said the case would take too much time to resolve.
Of course, the suits weren’t likely to produce a more amenable outcome for critics because it was unlikely the GOP-controlled Legislature, or the even more Republican-dominant Supreme Court, would have crafted maps more favorable than those already rejected.
“Following months of rancor from far-left special interests, those same organizations decided it was no longer in their best interest to litigate after the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the earlier 4-3 opinion under Ohio’s former chief justice,” Senate Republican spokesman John Fortney said in a statement, urging Ohio Democrats to “reject orders” from Mr. Holder and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and “give the process approved by the voters a chance to work.”
According to the Brennan Center, as of July 2023, at least 74 lawsuits in 27 states have been filed against post-2020 Census legislative maps nationwide. The American Redistricting Project maintains at least eight active legal challenges are specific to post-2020 Census congressional districts in South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Washington.
There are also pending or stalled lawsuits against congressional district maps in Michigan, North Dakota, and Ohio, while state lawmakers in North Carolina, New York, Alaska, Maryland, and Louisiana are under court orders to refashion congressional and/or state legislative districts by early 2024.
With a bevy of rulings expected between now and next spring, come Nov. 5, 2024, voters in some states will likely be casting ballots in different state legislative and congressional districts than they did in 2022.
How and where those court decisions shake out could also have significant repercussions in Congress, potentially making it structurally more difficult for Republicans to expand or sustain their 222-212 U.S. House majority in 2024 elections.
Lawsuits in at least six states demand GOP-led legislatures create additional competitive congressional districts for Democrats while only two redistricting challenges could foster decisions creating more competitive districts for Republican congressional candidates.
While Ohio is now certain not to be on that list, accepting the ‘March 2, 2022 plan’ could actually benefit Democrats in the state, Cook Political Report Editor Dave Wasserman said in a Sept. 7 post on X, formally Twitter.
Ending the lawsuits now mean, at least, “Republicans won’t get a chance to more aggressively re-gerrymander Ohio’s lines before 2024,” he wrote.
