Opinion ID: 6103646
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The enacted plan’s expected performance

Text: {¶ 42} Although Ohio has not yet held any congressional elections under the enacted plan, the parties agree that, in general, voting history in prior elections can predict future voting patterns. As a starting point, we examine how the two major political parties are expected to perform under the enacted plan. The parties have submitted the reports of several experts to aid in this analysis. {¶ 43} To start, Senate President Huffman and House Speaker Cupp argue that the enacted plan does not allocate each of Ohio’s 15 congressional districts to one party or another but instead maximizes the number of competitive districts. They rely on the report of their only expert, Dr. Michael Barber, who is an associate professor of political science at Brigham Young University with significant experience in evaluating political and elections-related data. Dr. Barber explained that in Ohio, Democratic voters are heavily clustered in urban areas and Republican voters are more evenly distributed throughout the state. This political geography, he concluded, constrains map drawers. Indeed, using the FEDEA dataset, he found that the enacted plan is “quite similar” to the plans proposed by the House and Senate Democrats: they all include six districts that are solidly Republican and two districts that are solidly Democratic. {¶ 44} Citing Dr. Barber’s report, Senate President Huffman and House Speaker Cupp assert that 8 out of Ohio’s 15 congressional districts must be drawn as “safe” districts for either Democrats or Republicans. Given that asserted reality, they decided to draw the remaining seven districts as competitive ones. Dr. Barber 18 January Term, 2022 confirmed that under the FEDEA dataset, the enacted plan includes seven competitive districts. He also evaluated the enacted plan’s competitiveness by determining whether a Democratic and Republican candidate for statewide federal office had won a majority of the two-party vote share in the district from 2012 to 2020. He again found seven competitive districts under the enacted plan. {¶ 45} But “competitiveness” is not a prescribed standard under Article XIX of the Ohio Constitution. That term does not appear within Article XIX, and rules of statutory construction forbid us from adding to the text of Article XIX. While supposed district competitiveness was offered here as a post hoc rationalization for the mapped districts in the enacted plan, Article XIX itself does not require it and does not provide any calculable measure for it. {¶ 46} Beyond that, petitioners submitted multiple expert reports showing that the enacted plan is not nearly as competitive as Senate President Huffman and House Speaker Cupp claim that it is. Dr. Jonathan Rodden is a professor of political science at Stanford University with expertise in the analysis of fine-grained geospatial data sets, including election results. He concluded that state statewide election results have more reliably tracked how Ohioans have voted in congressional elections. Dr. Rodden therefore concluded that by relying on only the FEDEA dataset, respondents exclude the most relevant data to predict the partisan outcomes of the enacted plan. Dr. Rodden claimed that by using a more comprehensive dataset and considering an incumbency advantage, the enacted plan has only two or three competitive districts. {¶ 47} Dr. Christopher Warshaw is an associate professor of political science at George Washington University and has written about elections and partisan gerrymandering. He noted that the FEDEA dataset excluded “the Republican wave year” of 2014 and heavily weighted the two federal elections in 2012, which was a “high-water mark for Democrats in Ohio.” Dr. Warshaw found that the plan has three competitive districts, although Republican candidates are favored in each. Dr. 19 SUPREME COURT OF OHIO Rodden and Dr. Warshaw both found that Republicans are likely to win 80 percent of the congressional seats (12 out of 15) under the enacted plan, even though Republicans have received about 53 percent of the vote in recent statewide elections. {¶ 48} Petitioners also submitted the analysis of other experts who compared the enacted plan to thousands of computer-simulated plans that comply with Article XIX’s neutral districting criteria. Dr. Kosuke Imai is a professor in the government and statistics departments at Harvard University and specializes in the development of statistical methods for social-science research. He used the FEDEA dataset in finding that Republicans likely will win 11 of 15 seats under the enacted plan.6 He generated 5,000 Article XIX–compliant simulated plans, again using the FEDEA dataset. Those simulated plans did not split any counties that the enacted plan does not split, contained more compact districts and had fewer county splits than the enacted plan, and were—just like the enacted plan—applied to Ohio’s particular political geography. {¶ 49} Dr. Imai found that Republicans would win 8 seats in 80 percent of those plans and 9 seats in the other 20 percent of those plans. None of Dr. Imai’s simulated plans awarded Republicans 11 or more seats. Dr. Imai therefore found— using the same dataset used by DiRossi—that Republicans are expected to win 2.8 more seats under the enacted plan than under the simulated plans. The enacted plan, Dr. Imai concluded, is “a clear statistical outlier,” which means there is the presence of “systemic partisan bias.” Dr. Imai concluded that the probability of the enacted plan’s partisan favoritism resulting from the application of neutral criteria is essentially zero. 6. Dr. Imai does not believe that the FEDEA dataset will accurately predict the partisan leaning of the districts in the enacted plan. He used that dataset only because DiRossi and others used it for predicting the partisan outcome of the enacted plan. Dr. Imai avers that the FEDEA dataset, if anything, undercounts the number of likely Republican seats. 20 January Term, 2022 {¶ 50} Dr. Jowei Chen is an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan and has published academic papers on legislative redistricting and political geography. He used the results of all statewide elections from 2016 to 2020 to generate 1,000 Article XIX–compliant simulated plans to assess whether the partisan outcome of the enacted plan is within the normal range of the simulated district plans. Dr. Chen found that Republicans will likely win 12 of 15 congressional seats under the enacted plan. In contrast, only 1.3 percent of the simulated plans created 12 Republican-favoring districts. Dr. Chen concluded that the enacted plan is a “statistical outlier” and that the plan’s “extreme” partisan bias cannot be attributable to Ohio’s political geography, which he accounted for in his simulations.7 {¶ 51} We conclude that the body of petitioners’ various expert evidence significantly outweighs the evidence offered by respondents as to both sufficiency and credibility, compelling beyond any reasonable doubt the conclusion that the enacted plan excessively and unwarrantedly favors the Republican Party and disfavors the Democratic Party. b. Additional comparisons focusing on particular counties {¶ 52} Petitioners also submitted compelling evidence showing how the enacted plan’s treatment of certain urban counties unduly favors the Republican Party and disfavors the Democratic Party. {¶ 53} Dr. Imai examined districts in Hamilton, Franklin, and Cuyahoga Counties and concluded that “the enacted plan packs a disproportionately large number of Democratic voters into some districts while cracking Democratic voters