Opinion ID: 6215878
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The commission violated Section 6(B)

Text: {¶ 55} Petitioners argue that like the invalidated plan, the revised plan violates Article XI, Section 6(B) because it does not “closely correspond[] with statewide voter preferences.” We agree. {¶ 56} Petitioners have presented a new report by their expert, Dr. Imai, who opines that the commission’s methodology for assessing the revised plan’s seat share grossly overestimates the number of Democratic-leaning seats. Dr. Imai points out that under the commission’s method, two hypothetical districts having Republican vote shares of 49.9 percent and 50.1 percent would be classified as Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning respectively, yet because their Republican vote shares differ by only .2 percentage points, their partisan leans are essentially the same. Both are truly “toss-up” districts. Yet the commission’s methodology would count the first as a Democratic district and the second as a Republican one. {¶ 57} Dr. Imai then demonstrates that the commission’s revised plan contains 12 House districts in which the Democratic vote share is between 50 and 51 percent—nine of which have Democratic vote shares between 50 and 50.5 percent. The commission calls them all Democratic-leaning districts. Yet, Dr. Imai points out that the revised plan contains no House districts within one percent above a 50 percent Republican vote share—i.e., no similarly close districts that are labeled Republican-leaning. The closest Republican-leaning House district in the revised 23 SUPREME COURT OF OHIO plan has a Republican vote share of 52.6 percent. The following plot from Dr. Imai’s report shows the disparity in the number of extremely close toss-up House districts assigned to each party: The blue dots running in a line nearly parallel to the 50-percent line represent the dozen toss-up “Democratic-leaning” House districts that have been identified by Dr. Imai. This plot also visually demonstrates Dr. Imai’s conclusion that “a shift in election results by just one percentage point towards the Republicans could lead to as many as 12 more Republican-won seats.” Dr. Imai opines, “By counting what are really toss-up districts as ‘Democratic-leaning’ in this way, the Commission’s methodology grossly overestimates the number of Democratic-leaning districts under the revised plan.” {¶ 58} Dr. Imai sets forth a different methodology that he claims provides a superior measure of a district’s partisan lean. That methodology, which was also used in his initial report, looks at whether a Republican or Democrat would have won the district based on the data from each election out of the nine statewide elections between 2016 and 2020, the same election years used by the commission. 24 January Term, 2022 It then labels each seat fractionally—for example, Dr. Imai calculates that House district 52, which the commission calls “Democratic-leaning,” would have been won by Republicans in four out of the nine elections, so his methodology counts that district as 4/9ths of a Republican-leaning seat and 5/9ths of a Democraticleaning seat. (Dr. Imai applies this method to safer seats as well—for example, a seat counted as 8/9ths of a Republican seat.) According to Dr. Imai, when averaging across the 2016 through 2020 statewide elections, Republicans would have won 6 out of the 12 “toss-up” House districts that the commission has labeled Democratic-leaning. Using this method, Dr. Imai calculates that the Republican Party is expected to win 61.6 House seats. {¶ 59} Dr. Imai compared this result to his 5,000 simulated plans. The revised plan’s 61.6 Republican House–seat share is 2.7 seats higher than in the average simulated plan, which had 58.9 Republican House seats. In fact, all 5,000 of the simulated plans contained fewer than 61.6 Republican House seats. Dr. Imai opines that “[t]he difference between the revised plan and the average simulated plan exceeds 5 standard deviations of the simulated plans and is therefore statistically significant.” He also compares the revised plan and the 5,000 simulated plans under a metric assessing the percentage of House seats a plan would net the Republican Party when compared with a strictly proportional plan. He calculates that the average simulated plan would contain 6.5 percent more Republican House seats than a strictly proportional plan, while the revised plan contains 9.2 percent more Republican House seats than a strictly proportional plan—a difference he again says is greater than five standard deviations and therefore statistically significant. He concludes that the revised plan makes it “almost certain for the Republican party to win disproportionately more seats relative to their statewide vote share.” {¶ 60} Article XI, Section 6 contains no specific language regarding the methodology that the commission is to employ when determining “[t]he statewide 25 SUPREME COURT OF OHIO proportion of districts whose voters    favor each political party,” other than to provide that the calculation shall be “based on statewide state and federal partisan general election results during the last ten years.” The parties have apparently agreed that 2016 through 2020 are the practicable years of data to use. Even using those same election years, Dr. Imai demonstrated how his method is preferable and more accurate than the commission’s. {¶ 61} But we need not endorse Dr. Imai’s methodology to conclude that the commission’s methodology, as applied here, violates Article XI, Section 6(B) of the Ohio Constitution. Bluntly, the commission’s labeling of a district with a Democratic vote share between 50 and 51 percent (in one case, a district having a 50.03 percent vote share) as “Democratic-leaning” is absurd on its face. Section 6(B) requires the commission to attempt to draft a plan in which the statewide proportion of districts whose voters “favor” each party closely corresponds to the statewide voters’ preferences. Here, the quality and degree of favoritism in each party’s allocated districts is grossly disparate. When 12 of the 42 “Democraticleaning” House districts (i.e., more than 25 percent) are very close “toss-up districts” yet there are 0 “Republican-leaning” districts that are similarly close, the proportion of districts whose voters “favor” each party is not being assessed properly. {¶ 62} To be clear, we do not read Article XI, Section 6(B) as prohibiting the creation of competitive districts. But competitive districts—which the 12 districts identified by Dr. Imai surely are, under any reasonable measure—must either be excluded from the proportionality assessment or be allocated to each party in close proportion to its statewide vote share. {¶ 63} Petitioners have established beyond a reasonable doubt that there are far fewer than 42 Democratic-leaning House districts in the revised plan. Yet even at 57 to 42 seats in the House and 20 to 13 seats in the Senate, petitioners have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the commission did not attempt to adopt a 26 January Term, 2022 plan in which the statewide proportion of districts favoring each party closely corresponds to the statewide preferences of the voters. We are convinced that a more closely proportional plan could have been achieved. We cannot credit the claims of those who drew the revised plan that that plan was the most proportional one possible, because the map drawers misunderstood their task. They were guided by incorrect directives, began with an invalidated plan, and worked to eliminate closely Republican-leaning districts by turning them into competitive “Democraticleaning” districts. The commission set its compass wrong, and it wound up in the wrong place. {¶ 64} Finally, we reject the suggestion that our order constitutes a mandate to gerrymander to create Democratic-leaning districts. This suggestion implies that neither the September 2021 plan nor the revised plan were Republican-favoring gerrymanders. The evidence demonstrates otherwise. Throughout the process, the Republican map drawers refused to expressly work toward a 54 to 46 percent partisan share. Yet that is not a “superficial ratio,” a “Democratic ratio,” or an “arbitrary percentage,” as one commissioner cavalierly dismissed it. Rather, as we made clear in League of Women Voters of Ohio, __ Ohio St.3d __, 2022-Ohio-65, __ N.E.3d __, it is a foundational ratio created not by this court or by any particular political party but instead etched by the voters of Ohio into our Constitution. To be sure, the ratio may be different in the next reapportionment, but for this reapportionment, the “statewide preferences of the voters of Ohio,” Article XI, Section 6(B), are 54 percent in favor of the Republican Party and 46 percent in favor of the Democratic Party. The revised plan does not attempt to closely correspond to that constitutionally defined ratio. Our instruction to the commission is—simply—to comply with the Constitution.