“We know that this matter will be in court,” Mr. DeWine said, according to the ABC channel News5Cleveland. “I’m not judging the bill one way or another, that’s up to a court to do. What I am sure in my heart is that this committee could have come up with a bill that was much more clearly, clearly constitutional and I’m sorry we did not do that.”
Ahead of this redistricting cycle, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved measures amending the state Constitution to limit partisan gerrymandering. A review by the Ohio Supreme Court of the constitutionality of the new map would be the first real test of whether the amendment works as intended.
The suit cites a wide, consistent gap between the share of votes that Republican candidates have drawn and their share of seats in the Ohio Legislature over the past 10 years.
“Republicans maintained a hammerlock on supermajority status in elections between 2012 and 2020 — at times controlling more than 65 percent of the seats in the Ohio House of Representatives and 75 percent of the seats in the Ohio State Senate, even though their statewide vote share over the decade ranged from only 46.2 percent to 59.7 percent,” the suit said, citing official election results.
Two years ago, a federal court tossed out the map of congressional districts that Ohio had used for most of the past decade, ruling that Republicans had given themselves an illegal partisan advantage that effectively predetermined the outcome of federal elections.