As Some Ohioans Make Confused Votes on Issue 1, Critics Say That's By Republican Design

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose talks to reporters. Credit: Susan Tebben, OCJ.

What is gerrymandering and how do we stop it?

That question is at the heart of Issue 1, the state constitutional amendment Ohioans will decide on this election, either leaving the method of drawing state and congressional districts in the hands of the current system of officials or handing the power over to a new independent, bipartisan commission of regular Ohioans.

Citizens Not Politicians, the pro-Issue 1 side, has promised that the new system would end gerrymandering as we’ve long known it in the state, which has gifted Republicans a near stranglehold on power.

Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s office wrote the ballot language for the amendment, which was approved by the Republican-dominated Ohio Ballot Board.

And it’s designed to confuse voters, as it says Issue 1 would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering approved by nearly three-quarters of Ohio electors” and “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.”

It’s why there’s been endless tales of voters walking into polling locations or filling out their absentee ballot and casting a vote against Issue 1 when they fully intended to vote for the measure.

“I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else,” one voter told Bolts Magazine. “They are using the term gerrymandering to describe an attempt to actually fix the gerrymandering.”

Similar tales have been shared on social media and with other news outlets.

Common Cause Ohio’s Mia Lewis told Scene the Republican messaging and the ballot language have been blatant efforts to muddy the waters.

“There’s a literal effort to trick people into voting the opposite way from what they intend,” Lewis said.

“Some go into the ballot booth intending to vote yes because they’ve heard that this is important,” she added. “Then they read the language which says this amendment will ‘require gerrymandering.’ And they go, ‘Oh, shoot, wait! Maybe I got it backwards? Let me go ahead and vote ‘no.’”

Lewis is referring primarily to the first two bullet points Ohioans have seen, or will see, at the very end of their ballot.

Such an introduction, especially to voters at the polls unaware of Issue 1’s significance, is part of why activists like Lewis are pulling their hair out.

“It’s not gerrymandering!” Lewis said.

“If your intention is to draw a map that’s actually accurate and accurately represents how people vote,” she added, “that is literally the opposite of gerrymandering.”

Gerrymandering, as a word itself, hails back to the infancy of the country, when Americans not in power realized public officials could essentially choose who kept them at their helm. The word comes from a Massachusetts governor who redrew his state’s districts to bolster his own Democrat-Republican Party. Which led to the dictionary definition: “to manipulate in order to gain an unfair advantage.”

Since the early 1800s, the word has carried primarily negative connotations. “When a man has been swindled out of his rights by a villain,” the Boston Gazette wrote on April 8, 1813, “he says he has been Gerrymandered.”

What appears insane to many Issue 1 supporters stems back a few years to 2015 and 2018, when statewide elections led to public questioning of how Ohio’s 15 congressional districts and 99 state legislative districts were drawn. It led to an Ohio Supreme Court case in 2022, where a majority struck down Ohio Republican gerrymanders seven times—and led to a necessary rewrite of those boundaries. Republicans ran out the clock in a federal court case, with a judge leaving the unconstitutional map in place. Former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, after leaving the bench, was among those who took up the charge to get the proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot.

This September, the ballot language itself came to a head when a 4-3 majority of the Ohio Supreme Court decided that the way Issue 1 was worded for voters was completely in line with the Ohio Constitution. A constitution that nullifies ballot language intended “to mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters.”

Democrat judges were horrified. Justice Jennifer Brunner called it “the most stunningly stilted ballot language that Ohio voters will have ever seen.” Brunner suggested Issue 1’s wording, as okayed by both the Ballot Board of Ohio and its Ohio Supreme Court, should have Ohioans questioning “Who’s in charge here—Ohio’s people, or its politicians?”

The issue has long been wielded by state Democrats as ample reasoning for the heaping mass of Republican dominance in the past decades. (Ohio’s had what’s called a trifecta of GOP leadership since 2010.) Democrats believe putting redistricting in the hands of people not in control (and reliant) on political boundaries is fair; state Republicans think the opposite—that any independent commission will be inevitably biased by its newfound power.

“In many ways, independence is the heart of it,” Atiba Ellis, a professor of law at Case Western who specializes in election issues, told Scene. “We trust judges because of they’re independent of political branches, right?”

Ellis laughed, extending the metaphor: “I mean, this is why we don’t let athletes bet on the games they’re involved in. Or the referees who officiate,” he added. “With that temptation, they’ll sway the call.”

But the question persists: Will Ohio voters be swayed by the Ballot Board’s wording of Issue 1 and gerrymandering in general?

In Cleveland, Sarah and Kayla, both in their early twenties, told Scene they were perplexed when they read Issue 1 during early voting.

“I feel like it definitely should be spelled out a little more,” Kayla told Scene, sitting at Lionheart Coffee on Euclid Avenue. “So that way, like, the average folder can understand what the actual, issues are and whatnot.”

Sarah didn’t think the wording actually mattered too much. People “see commercials or whatever,” she said. “And then they already have their decision after that.”

At the Arcade was Jim Marshall, 58, who said Issue 1’s wording on the ballot reminded him of another Issue 1, the decision granted to Ohioans to enshrine abortion protections in 2022.

Marshall seemed to question why so many of Ohio’s House of Representatives were Republicans (68 percent) compared to general political split of the state (42 percent GOP).

He could only think of one explanation: gerrymandering.

“That’s how the got the supermajorities in the State Senate,” Marshall told Scene. “I don’t think there’s that many people in Southern Ohio, you know? I mean, why are they having all the power?”