Ohio’s political map – the debate continues.

Backers of a proposal to reform Ohio’s troubled political map-making system, gets the go-ahead to begin signature-gathering. The Ohio Ballot Board cleared the way when it agreed unanimously that the constitutional amendment, proposed by Citizens Not Politicians, constitutes a single subject. The campaign committee now has until July to collect the 413,487 valid signatures, required to make the November 2024 ballot. The proposal calls for replacing the Ohio Redistricting Commission, which currently comprises three statewide officeholders and four state lawmakers, with an independent body, selected directly by citizens. The new panel’s members would be diversified by party affiliation and geography. The effort follows the repeated failure to produce constitutional maps of congressional and state legislative districts. During the protracted process for re-drawing district boundaries to account for results of the 2020 Census, challenges filed in court resulted in two congressional maps and five sets of Statehouse maps being rejected as unconstitutionally gerrymandered.