Ohio Board Sued Over Ballot Language: ‘Deceptive and Unconstitutional’

The Ohio Ballot Board was sued this week over certain “deceptive and unconstitutional” ballot language.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the Citizens Not Politicians campaign filed a lawsuit against the Ohio Ballot Board saying that the state’s Supreme Court should require a rewrite of language on ballots. The lawsuit argues that language on ballots for a redistricting measure “may be the most biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional” the state has seen.

The lawsuit was filed against the state’s ballot board, Ohio Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, Ohio’s elections chief and the panel’s chair.

“This Court’s intervention is needed to ensure that Ohio voters are provided with the truthful and impartial ballot title and ballot language required by law so that they can exercise their right to determine for themselves whether to amend the Ohio Constitution,” Citizens Not Politicians said in their lawsuit.

The lawsuit seeks to challenge a proposed amendment that will change Ohio’s political mapping system. The current map-making system in Ohio created a congressional map and seven statehouses, which were deemed unconstitutionally gerrymandered, as they favored Republicans in the state.

The proposal would overhaul the current redistricting commission—comprised of four lawmakers, the governor, the auditor and the secretary of state—replacing it with a 15-member citizen-led panel of Republicans, Democrats and independents. Retired judges would be responsible for selecting the members.

Last week, the Ohio Ballot Board approved language in the amendment that sparked the lawsuit from the Citizens Not Politicians campaign. The proposed constitutional amendment, which aims to “ban partisan gerrymandering,” would be described as establishing a 15-member Citizens Redistricting Commission that would be “required to gerrymander” Ohio’s legislative and congressional districts.

In its lawsuit, Citizens Not Politicians argue that the approved ballot language “gets it entirely backward,” asserting that their proposal aims to ban partisan map manipulation. The lawsuit states that the plan ensures the commission’s maps reflect Ohioans’ statewide partisan preferences while creating geographically contiguous districts that represent communities of interest.

However, Ohio Republican State Senator Theresa Gavarone argued that the wording in the proposed amendment is the same definition for “gerrymander” found in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Redistricting is the process of redrawing state electoral districts to reflect updated population data from the U.S. Census, conducted every 10 years. Gerrymandering refers to manipulating district boundaries to favor a particular political party or group.

The lawsuit from Citizens Not Politicians argues that the gerrymandering language and many other words in the ballot description violate the Ohio Constitution.

“Every single paragraph of the ballot language includes misleading and biased language that further serves to sway voters against the Amendment,” the lawsuit says.

After Friday’s ballot board meeting, neither LaRose nor Gavarone spoke to reporters. Instead, they recorded a 35-minute podcast with John Fortney, the communications chief for Republican Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman, where they defended the board’s actions and criticized the fall proposal—dubbed “Political Outcomes Over People”—as undemocratic, overly broad and impractical.