Redistricting Reform Goes Wrong

Predictable as the tides, the redistricting season across the country invites waves of litigation on the grounds of partisan gerrymandering. Despite the Supreme Court’s decision to end partisan gerrymandering at the national level, lawsuits grounded in state law allege gerrymandering of Congressional maps in states such as North Carolina and Ohio. Of the litigation so far, Ohio is an interesting case given how quickly the process dashed the hopes of reform activists. National and state outlets proclaimed in 2018 that the redistricting reform issue passed by voters would “bring fairness to redistricting,” and created a mandate that could end gerrymandering. Yet within three years, the process hailed to end gerrymandering produced maps that the Princeton gerrymandering project graded at an F for partisan fairness and a C for preserving geographic areas of interest; lawyer and elections law professor David Pepper noted the Congressional plan as “crashing through (democratic) guardrails into outright lawlessness” in their brazen partisan skew. As of this writing, the Ohio State Supreme Court is listening to arguments on whether redistricters engaged in a partisan gerrymander.

These critiques appear to be at least valid in their methodology, and form the basis of a lawsuit by the ACLU against the redistricting plan for its undue partisanship and violation of traditional geographic redistricting principles. The evidence brought to bear by the plaintiffs adheres to the best practices within redistricting research and litigation. While critics are correct that the Ohio redistricters violated the spirit of Issue 1 in creating a gerrymandering and shutting the public out, the problem arises in the loose letter of the law by which the maps shall be judged. By ignoring the technical criteria and constraining mechanisms beforehand to adjudicate a gerrymander, reformers rely too heavily on ineffectual public opinion and judicial discretion to make up for their own shortcomings. These pitfalls by Ohio redistricting reformers are illustrative of similar failings across the nation and speak to the need for future efforts to minimize the need to rely on good faith by clearly defining their standards and procedures in law and statute.