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The Ohio Supreme Court rules on who can use ballot drop boxes and who can't.

And the second of two conversations about the redistricting overhaul, known as issue one with an opponent of the amendment.

That's this week in the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

Voters can only use ballot drop boxes to deposit their own ballots.

And if they're delivering an early ballot for anyone else, they have to go in to the Board of Elections office.

That directive, issued August 31st by Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRosa, has been upheld by the Ohio Supreme Court.

In a ruling that minority Democrats blasted as, quote, little more than voter intimidation and quote and again quoting a travesty beyond description, the courts for Republicans said the lawsuit false.

September 27th was too late to avoid impacting early voting.

The decision means people assisting voters, usually family members of disabled or elderly Ohioans, will have to sign paperwork at boards of elections offices in person that they are authorized to drop off those ballots.

Larose said he was grateful and that the directive is designed to protect voters and election workers from accusations of illegal voting.

But the League of Women Voters said it's concerned about the workload this will create for elections officials.

The number of Ohioans in poverty stayed steady from last year, but the number of children living in poverty is concerning.

The state's 48 community action agencies, which work with low income people.

The 2024 State of Poverty in Ohio report shows that overall, 13.4% of Ohioans live in poverty.

That includes nearly 18% of children, nearly a third more than the overall rate.

The food insecurity rate for kids is more than 22%, higher than the overall rate.

23% of kids live in cost burdened households that spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

Phillip Hall, with the Ohio Association of Community Action Agency, says there are ways to combat poverty, but he fears they're not being pursued by supermajority.

Republican lawmakers.

to?

The answer is not the continuation of custody, income taxes.

Making the well-off better off is not a solution.

Cole says dealing with this is critical because it's hard for people who are born into poverty to get out.

and too many cases of poor families.

The life you will live is determined at birth.

Well, we know that poverty has many causes.

Your economic situation at birth is a major one.

It has nothing to do with personal choices.

Another note from the report.

13 counties are maternity care deserts, most of them where more than half of the women are low income.

Calls suggest the state can help by paying contractors to build affordable housing, increasing the allowance for Snap benefits and paying medical students costs if they commit to working in low income areas.

A refundable tax credit for low income families was proposed earlier this month by two Democratic lawmakers.

some Republican state lawmakers want to penalize immigrants for entering Ohio if they haven't gotten legal authorization to be in the United States, the so-called America First Act would create felony unlawful presence in the state, charges, and attach a one year prison sentence and several hundred dollars worth of fines as punishment.

One of the sponsors, Representative Gary Klick, said he wants state law to convey that Ohio is not a sanctuary state for illegal immigration.

An attorney with the Community, Refugee and Immigration Services, said the bill raises constitutional questions and, quote on its face demonstrates a significant misunderstanding of federal immigration law.

The law is modeled after an Oklahoma law which is currently on hold in federal court.

The Secretary of State's office reports more than 551,000 ballots have been cast by mail, in person, or deposited into drop boxes since early voting started earlier this month.

Over 1.4 million absentee ballots have been sent out.

Republicans are leading Democrats and requesting early ballots, but more than twice as many ballots have been requested by unaffiliated voters as Republican voters.

Early voting ends November 3rd.

Applications for early ballots must be received by local boards of elections by October 29th, and must be postmarked by November 4th, to be counted after the polls close on November 5th.

One driver for many voters is issue one, the complicated amendment to overhaul the redistricting process used for the first time in 2021, the Ohio Redistricting Commission approved maps that were ruled unconstitutionally gerrymandered seven times by the Ohio Supreme Court's three Democrats and Republican Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor.

A federal court allowed the maps to be used, and after O'Connor retired in 2022, the maps were tweaked and then unanimously approved by the seven elected officials on the Ohio Redistricting Commission.

I've talked to both yes and no campaigns.

Last week, Maureen O'Connor, the author of the amendment and this week, Republican strategist Ryan Steuben Roush speaking for the no.

On one campaign.

The amendment requires maps be drawn based on a proportionality formula that corresponds closely with the results of the last six statewide elections.

Now, almost every definition I've read of the word gerrymandering says that it's the practice of drawing district lines to give one party an extreme or unfair or bigger advantage than the other party.

How is what issue one would do unfair?

Or how is it gerrymandering?

If it's based on the results of the last six statewide elections that Ohioans voted it?

Sure.

It's a gerrymandering, like you said, which comes from back in the 1812, 18, 12 ourselves.

Guy named, Elbridge Gerry, former vice president who drew he and his party drew a map that looked like a salamander.

And they said, oh, it's a gerrymander.

And so that's where the term comes from.

And as long as you have to draw districts, you're always going to have to draw districts that are going to make some people mad.

And so issue one, what it would do is it takes, the gerrymandering protections that we have in the Constitution that were passed by voters overwhelmingly in 2015 and 2018.

And it crosses those out, and it puts issue one in its place.

And we talk about proportionality.

That's what the folks who support issue one like to talk about.

But the only way to get proportionality in a state like Ohio is to gerrymander districts.

And so Ohio is a big state.

You've got 88 counties.

And we've got pockets of people.

People don't live proportionately in the state of Ohio.

There's, you know, there's the big cities, there's the three C's.

But, you know, half of our population lives spread out and all sorts of counties.

And so, to get this proportionality that issue one requires the way to do it.

And the only way to do it is to take those cities and slice them up, dice them up and extend them, gerrymander them out into the suburbs, out into the rural areas.

You know, if we take Columbus here, you know, 1.3, almost 1.5 million people to get districts that are going to meet this proportionality.

They're going to have to slice and get voters probably all the way up to Marion County in Ohio, you know, 50, 60, 70 miles north.

And so doing that to get a political outcome, that's the definition of gerrymandering.

so how do you defend the current system which is created maps that resulted in 67% Republicans in Ohio's congressional delegation, 67% Republicans in the Ohio House and 79% Republicans in the Ohio Senate.

I mean, is that representative of how Ohioans vote?

The previous gerrymandering reforms that voters passed in 2015 and 2018, they went into how the maps were drawn most recently.

And listen, no one thinks that everything that the system is perfectly I certainly don't I'm not here to defend maps or lines or anything like that.

What I'm here to defend is the people who elect the map makers should be Ohioans, should be voters.

And what issue one does is it takes away the accountability that Ohioans have had for 222 years.

If you don't like the maps and how they're drawn, fire the map makers.

It's been that simple for quite some time.

But the real difference here, what we're seeing in Ohio is that policies change, politics change, parties change.

And that's why Republicans are dominant in Ohio.

It's not because of maps, it's because of voters.

I mean, look at the last 28 statewide executive elections.

Democrats are oh for 28.

And so that's not gerrymander.

You can't gerrymander a state that's just shifting policies and shifting, political preferences.

Democrats controlled the Ohio House.

They controlled all three branches of government in Ohio for decades, you know, 60, 70s, 80s, and then things changed.

And so the take the valley, the Mahoning Valley used to be a reliable stronghold for Democrats.

You know, it was just up there.

You could go from Toledo to Youngstown all the way across Lake Erie, up north.

And it was a bastion of Democrat support flip forward, you know, 2016 or so Donald Trump, that's changed completely.

And so party preferences are changing.

That's the big reason why Democrats can't win in Ohio.

It's not the lines, it's the policies in the candidates.

Well, could the argument be made, though, that gerrymandering has weakened the minority party was weaken the Democrats in Ohio?

Yeah, sure I get listen, I think that the biggest problem for Democrats winning elections continues to be Democrats, just like, you know, in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

The biggest problem for Republicans was the Republicans, and their candidates.

And so, you know, there's no perfect system for a map.

The only you the only way to get a true proportional map would just to be to have statewide elections for everything, you know, pick your top 15 candidates for Congress statewide.

And those people, women.

That doesn't work for a lot of other reasons that we have, because we can't lose sight of the other things that matter for districts, compact districts.

If I live, you know, if I live in Delaware County, Ohio, I would like my state representatives to be, you know, somewhere close to that.

I don't want my state represented lives to be 80, 90 miles away.

I want to be able to go to them and say, hey, this local issue that I care about, you are also local.

And so you care about that.

And so you can't have perfect maps at a draw.

They have everything that have partizan, this compactness, all those things.

Right.

But what issue one does is it takes that and says forget about these things like compact districts.

Forget about being able to talk to your representative about local issues.

All we care about is the Partizan makeup.

All we care about is that.

And that's that's gerrymandering.

A report from the Brennan Center earlier this year showed more than 9 million Ohioans, about 77% of the state's population live, in state House districts that are either uncontested, there's uncontested races or one party has a disproportionate advantage.

77%.

Is that fair?

It's not fair.

But, you know, one Ohio issue one is going to do it's going to take that to close to close to 100% because issue one passes, we are going to be required to draw districts based on, to, to draw districts that favor either Democrats or Republicans.

And so there's not going to be any competitive districts.

There's going to be the Republican districts there guys going to be the Democrat districts.

And that's going to be about it.

And if you don't like it, tough.

There's no accountability.

There's no redress.

There's no hey, I want to fire the map makers if you don't like it.

11.5 million Ohioans.

Too bad.

That's what we get on the issue on the no.

On one side is raise questions about how a panel of 15 people without any current or former political affiliations or professionalism in terms of being paid to be politicians who want to participate in a lengthy redistricting process, will be found now.

Former Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor was in that chair last week on the show, and she said that other states have done it and that they're going to encourage people to apply.

And in a state of 12 million people, they're going to find many people who fit that description.

And from that, 9015 will be chosen.

Why don't you think that's possible?

Well, it's certainly possible.

I mean, people can pick folks, but let's talk about something else you just said there, which is it has been tried before, and Michigan is the best example that we have.

Issue one's text is very close.

It's not exactly identical, but it's awful close.

95% of it's the same.

And just, I think it was last week, the former chairman of the Michigan Redistricting Commission was here in Ohio and and was asked about it.

And this this woman is an independent, not a Republican, not a Democrat.

And her advice to Ohioans was vote no.

I can't support issue one.

You shouldn't either.

Because her experience in Michigan and her experience was, listen, we started with these unelected bureaucrats, and they meant well at the beginning.

They had people's best interests in mind, but they quickly realized, according to her, that they had no there was no accountability.

They could do what they wanted.

They lost their way.

They did what they wanted and what they wanted.

And what they did in Michigan was they created maps and those maps for, held by a bipartisan and by a unanimous federal court to be unconstitutionally gerrymandered.

And so we know what we're going to get with issue one, and we shouldn't make the same mistakes that Michigan made.

I should add that, the chair of that commission in Michigan actually responded to my statehouse news of our colleague Sarah Donaldson defending the whole system in Michigan.

So I should put that out there.

Senate President Matt Hoffman and others have said that military members are excluded from this commission, as are their families and their employees.

And so our police officers and their families are citizens, not politicians.

Spokesman says that's not true, that they will be actually encouraged to apply.

Do you know where this is coming from that that this, information about these folks are excluded from the amendment is it where is it in the amendment?

It's actually it's right there in the in the text of the amendment, anyone who holds elective office, elected or appointive office.

And so that's a definition that's used in state and federal law.

And again, I hate to keep going back to Michigan because, you know, we don't like them so much in football.

But let's look at the text of the Michigan amendment very, very similar to Ohio, but Michigan, which has the same sort of disqualifications, has a carve out that says this doesn't apply to members of the military.

Well, but whoever wrote issue one, they decided not to include that.

And so Michigan saw this issue.

They said, oh, hey, this text is going to you know, obviously, we have members of the military, members of the Ohio National Guard that are appointed members of, state government.

So we have to make sure we can exclude them.

Since that same argument with police officers and probably the local dog catcher, those are all people who are going to be, prohibited from serving on this commission.

And so if you are, let's say you're a gold star widow, you know, your your husband or your wife has just has been killed in combat, 4 or 5 years ago shooting somebody like that be, like you said, recruited.

But, you know, you can recruit them all you want.

They are ineligible by the basic text of the amendment.

They could have done like Michigan did and carved out and protected those people.

But the people who wrote issue one decided not to do that.

And of course they would disagree if they were here.

But, let's move on here.

Members of the commission, such as Governor Mike DeWine, State Auditor Keith Faber, have said the current system does not work well.

And the maps, of course, went to the Ohio Supreme Court, ruled unconstitutional seven times.

A federal court had to step in to give us maps to use in 2022.

I can't imagine that this is working the way that voters want it to work when they voted for it in 2015, 2018.

So, I mean, it's not working the way it is now.

Yeah.

I wonder if you actually did a great job providing some insight on this, the way that the reforms in 2015 and 2018 were supposed to work was they were supposed to set up, a game that required competition.

And so everybody was supposed to sit down at the table and say, listen, if we don't come up with something, this isn't going to work.

But as autor Faber explained, that's not what a lot of the Democrats sat down with.

They sat down and said, hey, listen, I know we're supposed to do this thing, but we think the courts are a better option for us, and so we're going to go for that.

We think that's our best bet.

And obviously that's what they did.

The courts ruled one way.

There was a whole bunch of back and forth.

Then in the end, when the federal courts stepped in and said, no, no, no, we're going to do this, then all of a sudden it worked the way it was supposed to.

And we had bipartisan unanimous agreement from Republicans and Democrats.

Now, I would have been nicer, obviously, if it worked that way from the beginning.

And perhaps there are some changes and some future guidance we can get from courts that requires that competition.

But that would be, you know, there's always room to improve with any system, especially a system of government.

And so hopefully the next time around it would have work that well or hopefully the next time around.

If issue one fails, it will work better.

I know you can't speak for the legislature, but if indeed issue one does fail, governor DeWine has said that he wants to push forward a plan like they have in Iowa with a commission, and a process like they do in Iowa.

Is is that something that the folks who are against issue one would support?

I mean, it's a broad coalition, like you said.

I can't speak for him, but there's always room to improve.

And if Ohioans vote down issue one and still want to make changes, then I think that a lot of people would be happy to make a lot of those changes, O'Connor said last week.

The politicians will preserve their own personal power and status in government, and they're going to try to strengthen their party's power.

So if that's true, why leave the power to draw the maps in their hand?

Well, that what she said is true, but what she said is true because that's what issue one is doing.

It's trying to preserve.

It's trying to move the goalposts and change the rules.

Ohio Democrats haven't been able to win a whole lot lately.

And so instead of changing our policies or our candidates, let's just change the rules and maybe we'll get a few more seats in Congress, or maybe we'll get a few more seats in the Ohio Legislature or something like that.

But the real reason that politicians should draw the lines is the same reason that politicians should be judges and county commissioners and township trustees, and the auditor and the attorney general.

Accountability.

If you don't like those things that Mike DeWine is doing as Governor, Keith Faber is doing as auditor, or Mike Stinson was doing as Franklin County auditor, or is going to run out of names of elected officials here.

You can vote them out of office.

That's literally the bedrock of our constitutional democracy or our constitutional republic that we have.

If you don't like the people, throw the bums out, right?

But if you can't, then you get unelected, unaccountable people and unelected, unaccountable people throughout history, not just here in the United States.

They tend to make not good decisions that people don't like over time.

And you've kind of hinted at this, and certainly the no on one campaign has said it pretty directly.

This, they feel, is a Democrat power grab.

I mean, this will not benefit Democrats any more than it will definitely not benefit Democrats more than Republicans.

So how can you say that?

Well, it's certainly going to help Democrats.

Unless you're a minority.

You know, if you're an African American representative, I don't think it's going to help.

But what Democrats want to do here, I mean, we don't we it's let's not pretend that we don't know who's supporting, right?

30 plus million dollars from out of state and some foreign dark money groups who are giant progressives, Democrats, supporters.

They're on one side.

So we know why they want to do that.

And they want to do that because they would like more seats.

They would like to win more elections.

Now, they could do that 1 or 2 ways.

They could go the normal route, which is have candidates have policies that people support, get more votes.

You know, I think Tim Ryan, you know, former candidate for all sorts of things here in Ohio, has suggested that over many different times.

But that's not the way we want to go.

We want to change the rules and we want to change the maps and change the people who draw the maps in the hopes that we'll get a few more seats.

But I think what you said there is right.

It's not going to help them even that much because they keep losing.

And so the last six general elections again.

Oh 28 Democrats are in statewide elections.

And I don't think anybody expects it to get better.

I mean, of course, of course they run, Sherrod Brown's won one election, and now that's a federal election.

But nobody expects Donald Trump to win by less than he did or I. I think most polls are still showing him winning by 8 or 9 or so.

And so although the 2014 election was a little bit close, once we get further out and get rid of that 52% one, it's going to be 64% for Republicans.

Either way, unless Democrats change their policies and get elected more.

I'm glad you brought up the money issue.

You've criticizes and not politicians for the money.

About $23 million raised as of the report in August, and only about 16% came from Ohio.

Where's your money coming from?

Also, not very many places because we don't have that much money, certainly compared to most of them.

But most of the money supporting issue one.

And again, we're going to be outspent probably 10 to 1 and maybe 15 to 1.

Most of it is from Ohioans and groups that support Ohioans and things like that.

And so it's less of a problem of, hey, where's your money coming from?

Because you can see where it lines up.

It's for the people that usually support, Republicans and conservative ideas.

They tend to support issue one, the Democrats in the dark, money groups that support them or are on the pro side.

And so and we know why.

We know why.

Because the stakes of the election, we can't win.

So let's change the rules.

There's dark money on your side though, too.

Listen, dark money, dark money.

It sounds so scary, but, listen, 500 workforce perfectly legal in Ohio.

In state elections and federal elections, both sides use them.

The term dark money is actually, you know, it's probably silly.

And I will agree to stop using it forever if the Democrats will too.

Let's talk a little bit about the ballot summary language that was adopted by the Republicans on the ballot board.

The title says issue one would, quote, create an appointed redistricting commission not elected by or subject to removal by the voters of the state, which is what you've been saying throughout this interview, and also that it would, quote, establish a new taxpayer funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state, legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio, Democratic Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote in her dissent over the lawsuit over that language that it is perhaps the most stunningly stilted ballot language that Ohio voters have ever seen.

Is this language really fair language?

It's accurate and it's truthful and less than some of the folks who support issue one might not like it, but Partizan preference is being the one and only thing that we care about.

If issue one passes, the only way to get Republican districts and Democrat districts in a state like Ohio is to draw districts intentionally to favor one party or the other.

And that is the definition of gerrymandering.

And so, yes, issue one will remove the gerrymandering protections that we voted for in Ohio in 2015 and 2018, and it will replace it with mandatory gerrymander.

I know, I suppose, that the, the Democrats think, well, it's better gerrymandering, but it's requiring gerrymandering.

O'Connor said last week she thinks the language is unconstitutional.

Well, I would, I would tell the former chief justice who's not on the Supreme Court anymore, that the majority of the Supreme Court disagreed with her.

And so it is constitutional.

That's what the Supreme Court said.

The conventional wisdom is when voters are confused, they either don't vote or they vote no.

Are you counting on that confusion?

And those no votes to come from that, rather than from people who are truly opposed to issue one?

I hope that people read the ballot summary and I hope they read the ballot language and listen.

It's it's it's a lot of words.

Three pages.

Yeah, it's three pages long.

And listen, if they put more, it could have been longer.

And so I hope every time that every voter carefully considers each candidate and they carefully consider the actual language and they make an informed decision, you know, honestly, though, people are busy and sometimes that doesn't happen.

And so I don't think anybody's counting on all the people are going to just vote no because they don't like it.

I think people are going to read the summary and say, I don't think that sounds so good, and I hope they do vote now.

And your support is Republicans.

I mean, issue one supports the yes side has touted being bipartisan.

For instance, Maureen O'Connor is a Republican.

It feels like as they are party to fight and divided, so to speak, with you having all Republicans on your team, that maybe it's Republicans just trying to keep control of the process.

Sure.

There's been some bipartisan opposition as well.

I mean, look, just the other day, we saw, Michelle Reynolds, who's a, an African-American Republican, and she had a press conference with, I'm going to forget his name.

I'm sorry, but he was a Democrat from Cleveland, John Barnes, thank you very much.

And so they both came together and said, we don't like this.

And again, let's go back to Michigan, that state up north once again, their their congressional, the African-American congressional caucus up there, they didn't like it and they didn't like it because when issue once when the when the same redistricting commission passed up there, they saw fewer African-American representatives.

You know, Detroit is a majority black city.

And they had their the number of African-American representatives shrunk down with issue one.

And so I think a lot of the Black caucus members on both sides are probably looking at this and going, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati.

The only way to get this forced gerrymandering is to carve up some of these seats that have been traditionally, African-American or minority representatives.

And so that's why some of the bipartisan opposition has been there on the Republican or on the no side as well.

and again, we had the.

Yes.

On issue one side last week.

You can see that interview in our archives at State news.org.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State news.org or find us online by searching State of Ohio Show.

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Look for it every Monday morning wherever you get your podcasts, and please join us again next time for the State of Ohio.

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The law offices of Porter, right, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

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Porter Wright inspired Every day in Ohio Education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools.

Every child deserves more at OHEA.org.