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

Heading: The commission violated Section 6(A)

Text: {¶ 34} Article XI, Section 1 of the Ohio Constitution requires the “commission” to draft a district plan. Although the Republican and Democratic commission members were somewhat more cooperative in the development of the revised plan, as noted above, Senator Sykes’s optimism about collaboration proved short-lived. DiRossi and Springhetti still ultimately drafted the plan, and they answered only to Senate President Huffman and House Speaker Cupp. As before, “the commission itself did not engage in any map drawing or hire independent staff to do so,” League of Women Voters of Ohio at ¶ 119. {¶ 35} Moreover, in League of Women Voters of Ohio, we noted the distinction between Section 9(B), which “contemplates that this court may declare a plan invalid and order the commission to adopt an entirely new plan,” and Section 9(D)(3), under which this court does “not have to declare a plan entirely invalid if violations of Section 2, 3, 4, 5 or 7 are isolated or would require amendments regarding relatively few districts.” (Emphasis added.) __ Ohio St.3d __, 2022Ohio-65, __ N.E.3d __, at ¶ 96. We made clear that we were invalidating the original plan, in its entirety, under Section 9(B). 8. After this court’s judgment, petitioners acknowledged that the plan Dr. Rodden previously submitted did not comply with all of Article XI’s requirements. Dr. Rodden submitted the Rodden II plan, in which he purported to correct the violations. 14 January Term, 2022 {¶ 36} Yet the commission did not adopt an entirely new plan. DiRossi and Springhetti started with the same plan that we invalidated and then merely adjusted certain districts just enough so that they could nominally be reclassified as “Democratic-leaning.” As DiRossi testified before the commission, when he finally got “over the hurdle to go under 50 [percent of Republican vote share in a district],” he “would move on to another district.” At the same hearing, DiRossi was asked why the plan contained many districts with a Democratic vote share between 50 and 52 percent but contained zero districts with a Republican vote share of less than 52 percent. The questioner asserted, “So effectively, you know, you are creating districts with less opportunity for clearly perhaps Democrats to sit into those seats,” and then she asked why those decisions had been made. DiRossi responded: [I]f you’re asking if we were identifying collectively as a staff a district that might favor Republican by 53 percent and trying to make it a Democrat-leaning seat, yes is moving to the other side of the ledger, so I think that’s why there is an absence of those seats on the Republican side because they were identified by the staff, they were—they were modified to make Democrat-leaning and so that’s why they’re not there anymore. {¶ 37} It is clear that the map drawers and the commission knew that their approach—starting with the invalidated map and switching competitive Republican-leaning districts to competitive Democratic-leaning districts—would have the dual effect of eliminating weak Republican districts and creating weak Democratic districts. The commission nevertheless adopted the revised map using that process—on a party-line vote. This was not the process that our decision contemplates, and the commission’s awareness of the partisan effects supports an 15 SUPREME COURT OF OHIO “inference of predominant partisan intent” similar to the one we found with respect to the original plan, __ Ohio St.3d __, 2022-Ohio-65, __ N.E.3d __, at ¶ 118. {¶ 38} We find unavailing the claim that the map makers started with the original plan because time was short and they were familiar with it. We clearly invalidated the entire original plan in League of Women Voters of Ohio. The commission’s choice to nevertheless start with that plan and change it as little as possible is tantamount to an intent to preserve as much partisan favoritism as could be salvaged from the invalidated plan. {¶ 39} It is also clear that the commission rejected, without explanation, easy and obvious changes that would have made the revised map more proportional. Senator Sykes proposed to swap the Senate districts to which House districts 26 and 30—both in Hamilton County—are assigned, which would have created an additional Democratic-leaning Senate district. This simple swap would have posed no other constitutional problems and would have resulted in Senate districts that are at least as compact as those in the revised plan. Yet the commission refused to adopt the change, with House Speaker Cupp abruptly and inexplicably cutting off Senator Sykes’s questioning of DiRossi and Springhetti about the proposal. The commission’s choice to avoid a more proportional plan for no explicable reason points unavoidably toward an intent to favor the Republican Party. In reaching this conclusion, we are not unmindful of the fact that 20 is the number of senators necessary to constitute a veto-proof supermajority in the Senate, see Ohio Constitution, Article II, Section 16 (a vote of 60 percent of the members of each chamber is required to override the governor’s veto). {¶ 40} Article XI, Section 6(B) provides that the commission shall attempt to draft a plan in which “[t]he statewide proportion of districts whose voters    favor each political party shall correspond closely to the statewide preferences of the voters of Ohio.” (Emphasis added.) Yet the commission knowingly adopted a plan in which all the House districts whose voters favor Republicans do so at vote 16 January Term, 2022 shares of 52.6 percent and above, while more than a quarter (12 out of 42) of the House districts whose voters “favor” Democrats do so at a vote share between 50 and 51 percent (meaning that a 1 percent swell in Republican vote share would sweep 12 additional districts into the Republican column). Nine of those districts favor Democrats at a level under 50.5 percent. While the Constitution does not require exact parity in terms of the vote share of each district, the commission’s adoption of a plan in which the quality of partisan favoritism is monolithically disparate is further evidence of a Section 6(A) violation. In other words, in a plan in which every toss-up district is a “Democratic district,” the commission has not applied the term “favor” as used in Section 6(B) equally to the two parties. The commission’s adoption of a plan that absurdly labels what are by any definition “competitive” or “toss-up” districts as “Democratic-leaning”—at least when the plan contains no proportional share of similar “Republican-leaning” districts—is demonstrative of an intent to favor the Republican Party. Indeed, if a Republican candidate were to win in half of the 12 House districts in which the Democratic vote share is between 50 and 51 percent, the Republican Party could expect to have a 63 to 36 majority in the House. This is an even larger Republican majority than the one contemplated in the September 2021 plan that we invalidated. See League of Women Voters of Ohio, __ Ohio St.3d __, 2022-Ohio-65, __ N.E.3d __ at ¶ 24 (noting that Senate President Huffman estimated that 62 seats in the House would favor Republican candidates). Regardless, the revised plan’s structure guarantees that the 58 percent seat share for Republicans is a floor whereas the 42 percent seat share for Democrats is a ceiling. {¶ 41} In League of Women Voters of Ohio, we also relied on statistical evidence—including a partisan-symmetry analysis and a determination that the original plan was a partisan outlier compared to Dr. Imai’s 5,000 simulated plans— to support our finding of a violation of Article XI, Section 6(A). Id. at ¶ 122-126. As support for that finding of primarily partisan intent, we also cited evidence that 17 SUPREME COURT OF OHIO the original plan had a heavier partisan skew than would be dictated merely by Ohio’s political geography and the neutral map-drawing requirements of Article XI, Sections 3 and 4. Id. at ¶ 131. {¶ 42} As in the original plan that this court invalidated, there is evidence that the revised plan has a high degree of partisan asymmetry: Dr. Latner’s analysis indicates that with 50 percent of the statewide vote, Democrats would expect to win 43 percent of the House seats and 42 percent of the Senate seats. By contrast, the Republicans would win 57 percent of the House seats and 58 percent of the Senate seats with the same percentage of the statewide vote. Dr. Latner concludes that “the asymmetry in both the revised House and Senate maps is only a marginal improvement from the Original Plan and lags far behind all other comparison plans.” He further opined that “the Commission intentionally created a large number of highly competitive but Democratic-leaning districts, while keeping more Republican voters in safer districts. That decision is a major source of the observed asymmetry.” {¶ 43} There is also evidence that the revised plan is a statistical outlier in terms of Republican seat share (more than five standard deviations greater) and in terms of various accepted metrics in political science for measuring partisan bias (ranging between six and nine standard deviations), as compared with Dr. Imai’s 5,000 simulated plans. As we said in League of Women Voters of Ohio, “[t]he fact that the adopted plan is an outlier among 5,000 simulated plans is strong evidence that the plan’s result was by design.” __ Ohio St.3d __, 2022-Ohio-65, __ N.E.3d __, at ¶ 124. We again find petitioners’ statistical evidence to be compelling. {¶ 44} As in the original plan that this court invalidated, there is also evidence that it was possible for the commission—had it committed to attempting a proportional map, worked collaboratively toward that end, and used its allotted time efficiently—to draw a map that achieved or closely achieved the 54 to 46 percent partisan share that we identified in League of Women Voters of Ohio. The 18 January Term, 2022 record indicates that the commission did not reconvene until January 18—six days after our ruling ordering the commission to draft a new plan within ten days—and did not hold a substantive meeting until January 20, forcing the process to be rushed. While DiRossi and Springhetti, who worked for Republican commission members, and Glassburn, who worked for Democratic commission members, nominally met with commission members and their staffs, DiRossi and Springhetti still prepared a statewide map about which Senator Sykes was “in the dark,” about which House Minority Leader Russo had “little clue,” and that was introduced and later adopted on the same day. {¶ 45} In League of Women Voters of Ohio, we further found the existence of an alternative, more proportional plan to be probative evidence that the commission had drawn the original plan primarily to favor the Republican Party. Id. at ¶ 126. Petitioners focus on the Rodden II plan, which they claim is less skewed than the revised plan. The commission asserts that the Rodden II plan contains violations of Article XI, Section 3(D)(3) that “affect thousands of people and would require substantial redrawing.” The commission, however, relies on DiRossi’s opinion, which at this point we do not view as an objective measure of the validity or constitutionality of the various plans. {¶ 46} Regardless, Glassburn has also prepared a map that he avers is both proportional and otherwise constitutional. Glassburn submitted an initial version of his map to the commission on its final day. Commission members identified potential constitutional violations in that map, which Glassburn avers he could have addressed if given several hours. The commission did not permit him to do so. The commission also rejected his offers to work to add additional Democratic seats to the revised plan, citing time pressure (which, of course, the commission itself had created). Glassburn avers that he later corrected the errors in his map and that he now has a map that addresses the issues the commission raised with his original 19 SUPREME COURT OF OHIO map and is proportional, containing 54 Republican House seats, 45 Democratic House seats, 18 Republican Senate seats, and 15 Democratic Senate seats. {¶ 47} Despite its unwillingness to work toward fixing Glassburn’s more proportional plan, the commission concedes that its revised plan also contains “a few minor violations of Section 3(D)(3).” We find the evidence regarding alternative plans to be just as persuasive here as the original Rodden plan was in League of Women Voters of Ohio. {¶ 48} The decennial reapportionment of seats in the General Assembly is a weighty and important task, which the people of Ohio, by their overwhelming approval in 2015 of amendments to Article XI of the Ohio Constitution, entrusted to a special body of limited duration and singular purpose: the Ohio Redistricting Commission. See Article XI, Section 1(A). The commission is composed, in part, of three of the state’s highest executive officeholders. Id. Their duties as commission members, however, do not overlap with their roles as governor, secretary of state, or auditor. Id.; see generally Article XI. Rather, the Constitution taps these high officeholders to help usher Ohio through its redistricting because they can be counted on as reliable stewards of the public trust. The commission’s remaining members are persons appointed by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the House Minority Leader, the President of the Senate, and the Senate Minority Leader. Article XI, Section 1(A). The Constitution does not require these officeholders to appoint themselves to the commission—although that is what most of them have chosen to do in this case. In fact, it does not require the persons they appoint to be members of the legislature. Id. But whichever persons are appointed, the commission members are all public servants, regardless of their roles outside the commission, and they are entrusted with the solemn duty to draw a district plan that complies with the requirements of Article XI. They are charged with drawing a plan that inures to the benefit of not just one political party, not just one constituency, but of Ohio as a whole. Members of the legislature selected to 20 January Term, 2022 serve on the commission must be, in good faith, commission members first, setting aside their usual partisan modes. Section 6(A) directly prohibits actions in conflict with this principle. {¶ 49} We hold that the evidence discussed above demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that in drawing the revised plan, the commission failed to comply with Article XI, Section 6(A) of the Ohio Constitution. As explained in more detail below, we invalidate the entire revised plan and order the commission to draft an entirely new plan—this time in accordance with all of Article XI, including Section 6(A), as explained above.