A federal court in Ohio on Friday struck down the state’s congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and ordered the state to draw new voting lines for the 2020 election.
In a 300-page ruling, the three-judge panel for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio found the redistricting plan, enacted by the Ohio legislature and signed into law in 2011, violated the First and 14th Amendments and exceeded the powers granted to the states under Article I of the Constitution. The map, they said, was drawn to entrench the Republicans in power and disadvantage Democratic voters.
The court ordered the state to draw new lines for the 2020 election and gave the General Assembly a deadline of June 14 to enact a remedial redistricting plan. If the state legislature fails to enact a new map, the court will instead draw new voting boundaries for the 2020 election.
The ruling from the federal court comes as the Supreme Court is set to rule in the coming weeks on two partisan gerrymandering cases, one from Maryland and one from North Carolina. The justices heard oral arguments in those cases in March, and a ruling is expected by the end of June.
In Maryland, Republican voters challenged the lines of the state’s 6th Congressional District drawn by Democratic state lawmakers. In North Carolina, Democratic voters challenged the full congressional voting map drawn by the state’s Republican leaders.
The pair of cases, which came to the court ahead of the next redistricting cycle in 2021, raised the question of whether extreme partisan gerrymandering runs afoul of the Constitution.
In Ohio, Democratic voters from each of the state’s 16 congressional districts and five organizations challenged the constitutionality of its redistricting map, which was drawn by the state’s GOP-controlled legislature.
“In 2011, when Ohio’s redistricting process began, Republican dominance in the Ohio state government meant that Republican state legislators could push through a remarkably pro-Republican redistricting bill without meaningful input from their Democratic colleagues,” the court said. “Ohio Republicans took advantage of that opportunity, and invidious partisan intent — the intent to disadvantage Democratic voters and entrench Republican representatives in power — dominated the map-drawing process.”
GOP legislators, the court said, drew the districts with “one overarching goal in mind — the creation of an Ohio congressional map that would reliably elect 12 Republican representatives and four Democratic representatives.”
The plan has achieved its desired outcome, as Republicans have won 12 of the state’s 16 congressional seats in the four election cycles that have been held under the voting map.
The three-judge panel implicated state and congressional Republicans in the mapmaking process, including former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. The judges said in their ruling that in some instances, “national Republican operatives had the authority to ‘sign off’ on changes” before they were implemented at the state level.
