In November, Ohio residents will have an opportunity to vote on Issue 1, a constitutional amendment that would finally abolish the state’s extreme partisan gerrymandering. Voters will not, however, be informed of this fact on the ballot. Instead, the Ohio Supreme Court’s Republican majority ruled Monday that the amendment will be described in egregiously misleading terms on the ballot itself, with ultra-biased language designed to turn citizens against it. Incredibly, a proposal that would end gerrymandering will be framed as a proposal to require gerrymandering, a patently false representation of its intent and effect. The court’s 4–3 decision marks yet another effort to subvert democracy in Ohio by Republicans who fear that the citizenry—when given a voice on the matter—might dare to loosen their stranglehold on power.

The decision in Citizens Not Politicians v. Ohio Ballot Board is the latest volley in a long-standing battle over a simple question: Should Ohio have a representative democracy, or should GOP lawmakers be allowed to draw wildly unrepresentative districts that permanently entrench their rule? For decades, Ohio has been one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. In 2015 and 2018, its voters overwhelmingly approved two constitutional amendments designed to limit partisan influence over maps. The amendments required the Legislature to enact genuinely bipartisan redistricting plans; if lawmakers failed to do so, a new bipartisan board, the Ohio Redistricting Commission, had to draw fair, representative maps.

This process proved easy to game by political actors, because Republican politicians held a majority on the new commission. In 2021 and 2022, this GOP majority enacted a series of flagrant gerrymanders, which the state Supreme Court struck down. The commission flouted the court’s decisions over and over again, running out the clock to the election. It then invited a conservative federal court to impose a gerrymander that the Ohio Supreme Court had already ruled unconstitutional. As a result, the state’s Republicans won a towering and unearned supermajority in the Ohio Legislature.

Issue 1 is a direct response to this disaster. The proposal would repeal most of the earlier amendments and, in their place, create a truly independent redistricting commission made up of five Republicans, five Democrats, and five unaffiliated voters. This new board would be obligated to draw legislative and congressional maps that do not unduly favor one party over the other. These maps would prioritize proportionality, meaning that a party should win a number of seats roughly proportional to its statewide vote. So if Republican candidates win about 57 percent of votes, they should win about 57 percent of seats in the state Senate—not 79 percent of seats, as they did under the 2022 gerrymander.

More than 535,000 Ohioans signed petitions to place Issue 1 on the ballot, reflecting widespread support for the reform. The final question was how exactly the proposal should be described to voters on the ballot. Unfortunately, the task of writing the ballot language fell to the Ohio Ballot Board, another partisan body with a Republican majority led by Secretary of State Frank LaRose. Just last year, LaRose tried to manipulate the ballot-initiative process in Ohio to thwart an abortion rights amendment seeking to raise the threshold of passage from 50 percent to 60 percent. (He failed, and the abortion amendment passed.) LaRose also sat on the redistricting commission that pushed gerrymandered maps in defiance of the Ohio Supreme Court.

Now LaRose is abusing his position on the Ohio Ballot Board to paint Issue 1 in a comically negative light. The Ohio Constitution bars ballot language that would “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters.” Yet the board’s description of the amendment states that it would create “a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts” to produce “partisan outcomes” (emphasis added). It also declares that the amendment would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering approved by nearly three-quarters of Ohio electors participating in the statewide elections of 2015 and 2018,” a gratuitous reference to the failed reforms of the previous decade.

The board’s description also asserts, in fearmongering rhetoric, that the amendment would “eliminate the longstanding ability of Ohio citizens to hold their representatives accountable for establishing fair state legislative and congressional districts.” And it declares that the amendment would “prevent a commission member from being removed, except by a vote of their fellow commission members, even for incapacity, willful neglect of duty or gross misconduct”—which is just a scary way of saying that the commission holds exclusive power to remove its own members. The amendment’s title, as chosen by the board, similarly attempts to frighten citizens into opposing it. It’s described not as an anti-gerrymandering reform but as an attempt to “create an appointed redistricting commission not elected by or subject to removal by the voters of the state.”

This phrasing is exaggerated to the point of falsity and is wildly unconstitutional. Ballot language may not, under state law, attempt to sway voters for or against the initiative it’s describing. It must remain honest and objective. And yet the Ohio Supreme Court upheld this distorted, pejorative language on Monday in a cynical decision that itself reflects profound hostility toward Issue 1. Why? In early 2023, Republicans flipped the court to a 4–3 conservative majority. That majority is now flexing its power to obstruct the fight against gerrymandering in Ohio. (One member of the majority, Republican Justice Pat DeWine, is the son of Gov. Mike DeWine—who is himself a member of the current broken redistricting commission that the amendment would abolish.)

The majority’s reasoning is so willfully obtuse that it would be funny if it weren’t so antidemocratic. In its unsigned opinion, the majority asserts that it is fair to claim that the amendment requires gerrymandering because it “prioritizes partisan political outcomes above all else.” In reality, the proposal merely uses political outcomes as a benchmark to ensure partisan fairness, preventing one party from manipulating districts to seize an unearned, lopsided edge in the Legislature. The Ohio Supreme Court recasts this approach as an evil worse than gerrymandering; it equates the consideration of political data (to guarantee fair maps) with the abuse of such data (to enact unfair maps). As Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote in dissent, the majority thereby greenlights “a fraud upon the voters.” Its decision is utterly “lacking in integrity,” upholding an Orwellian lie that accuses the amendment of doing the exact opposite of what it actually does.

The majority took a similarly blinkered view of the ballot board’s other efforts to stack the deck against Issue 1. It upheld entirely unnecessary language that lauds the failed reforms of the past decade and cautions voters against repealing them, praising it as “factually accurate.” (In truth, as Brunner noted, this language is “impermissibly argumentative,” serving “no purpose other than to dissuade voters from voting for the amendment.”) The majority also asserted that it is “self-evidently true” that Issue 1 would “eliminate the longstanding ability of Ohio citizens to hold their representatives accountable for establishing fair state legislative and congressional districts.”

This rhetoric is not “self-evidently true”; rather, it openly takes sides in the debate over gerrymandering. Opponents of the practice argue persuasively that legislators cannot be held accountable when they’re entrenched in unfair districts. Supporters of gerrymandering claim that legislators remain accountable no matter what because they can in theory still be voted out—even though in practice it’s a veritable impossibility. The ballot board’s Republicans support the latter view, one that happens to benefit their fellow Republicans. So they wrote it into the ballot language, and the state Supreme Court gave them the thumbs-up.

Much of the remaining ballot language, including its title, is little more than a condemnation of the amendment. The whole purpose of Issue 1 is to put redistricting in the hands of citizens, not politicians. But the ballot board recast this reform as a malevolent plot to give unaccountable and potentially corrupt bureaucrats total control over redistricting. And the Ohio Supreme Court rubber-stamped it, up to a false suggestion that commissioners could not be removed for “gross misconduct.” The court even upheld language implying that voters could not challenge the commission’s work in federal court, a suggestion that is obviously and indisputably untrue.

“By adding negative language that is not remotely close to the proposed amendment’s language,” Brunner explained in her dissent, “the ballot board crafted language to mislead voters into believing that there is something ‘bad’ about the amendment—instead of omitting argumentative language and letting the voters make their decisions unfettered by the board’s proselytizing.”

Now proponents of Issue 1 will have to explain to Ohio voters that their own ballots are lying to them about what the amendment would do. It is not the only state court subverting the will of the people to preserve unlawful gerrymandering: Florida’s Republican-controlled Supreme Court is poised to nullify the state’s fair-district amendments, handing GOP lawmakers unlimited power to enact grievously skewed maps. Direct democracy was designed to ensure that citizens exercise their own ultimate authority over the law when intransigent politicians defy the popular will and establish unrepresentative rule. But it may prove impossible to restore democracy through the ballot when black-robed partisans weaponize state courts in favor of the ruling regime.

Read the original piece here.