COLUMBUS, Ohio (CN) — The Ohio Supreme Court on Thursday again rejected new legislative maps, sending the Ohio Redistricting Commission back to the drawing board for the fourth time.
In another 4-3 decision, the court ordered the Republican-controlled commission to file new district maps for the state Senate and House of Representatives by May 6.
The majority - comprised of Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor and Justices Jennifer Brunner, Melody Stewart and Michael Donnelly - found that the latest set of statehouse maps, like the three previous iterations, violates the Ohio Constitution and its voter-approved amendment concerning redistricting and gerrymandering.
State election officials have said they need new maps to be finished by next Wednesday, April 20, in order to have them ready for Aug. 2, the last possible day for a makeup legislative primary to be held. State legislative candidates have been pulled from the ballot for the regularly scheduled May 3 primary, which features a U.S. Senate race.
But the majority dismissed that concern in its unsigned opinion.
"The so-called April 2 'deadline' for implementing a General Assembly-district plan appears to be an artificial deadline that is based on a speculative, potential primary-election date for stat legislative races," the ruling states.
The opinion added, "No matter what the primary date is to be, time is of the essence."
A Republican group has filed a separate case in federal court seeking an order for the state to use previous maps rejected by the state justices. A three-judge panel refused to intervene but retained the right to choose a map and set a primary date if the commission can't reach a solution by April 20.
The majority in Thursday's opinion, however, was skeptical the federal panel would set a new date.
"Any suggestion that the federal court could – much less that it should – set an August 2 primary election date as a remedy in the federal court litigation strikes us as a dubious proposition at best," the ruling states.
After the third rejection of legislative maps by the Ohio Supreme Court last month, the redistricting commission hired a pair of bipartisan consultants – Michael McDonald and Douglas Johnson – to create new districts. They spent four days drawing the maps, with the process being livestreamed. With the deadline looming, the mapmakers told the commission that they only needed about 45 more minutes to finish the maps, but Ohio State Senate President Matt Huffman, a Republican who also sits on the commission, introduced a new plan, which practically mirrored the previous plan the court had already rejected. Most of the commission only saw the newly drawn maps minutes before the vote to approve them.
In rejecting the fourth set of maps, the majority admonished the commission for repeating the mistakes made in early versions. The judges said the newest plan "suffers from a similar fundamental flaw that we found obstructed the constitutionality of the plan we invalidated" in the last rejection.
The court found minor changes in the latest maps were not sufficient to address the constitutional issues, and pointed to the obvious partisan leanings in the new drawings that mischaracterized competitive districts as Democratic-leaning.
"As before, the commission did not adopt a plan using a process that Article XI and this court's prior decisions require," the opinion states, referring to the Ohio Constitution amendment that says redistricting plans should not favor one party.
Although it denied a request by voting rights groups for the court to adopt a redistricting plan, finding it does not have the constitutional authority to go that far, the majority suggested the commission continue working with McDonald and Johnson to complete the progress made by the independent mapmakers.
"By certain measures, their plan – though incomplete – is on track to being constitutionally compliant," the ruling states.
A dissenting opinion from Justice Sharon Kennedy once again admonished the majority for overstepping its authority.
"By adhering to its view of unlimited power, the majority keeps bringing us back to September 2021 – the time when these redistricting cases were first filed; we are stuck in a time loop, like the characters in the movie 'Groundhog Day,'" Kennedy wrote.
Justices Patrick Fischer and Patrick DeWine also wrote dissenting opinions declaring overreaches by the majority.
In her concurring opinion, Brunner wrote a scathing rebuke of the Ohio Redistricting Commission.
"What appeared to be the start of a transparent redistricting process when the two independent map drawers were engaged by the commission became transparent only in the sense that it exposed the falsehood that some of the commission members had fulfilled their obligations under the Ohio Constitution," she wrote. "As to that, Ohioans are still watching and waiting."
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