Voters line up to enter their polling place at the Cincinnati Observatory on Election Day.Carolyn Kaster/AP

Ohio Voters Defeated a major election initiative Tuesday that would have End of partisan charcuterie in the state and reined in the lopsided majorities Republicans hold in the state Legislature and the U.S. House delegation. The measure, known as Issue 1, was rejected by 54 percent of the vote.

Republicans used their power aggressively to thwart a measure that appeared to have the support of a large majority of voters in the state. Ohio voters passed two previous redistricting reform measures, in 2015 and 2018, with more than 70% of the vote each time.

But when it came time to put Question 1 on the ballot, Ohio Republicans grossly distorted the intent of the measure, which would have created a citizens’ redistricting commission to draw new maps for the state Legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives after GOP legislative leaders gutted previous redistricting initiatives. THE ballot initiative summary passed by the Ohio Polling Board, which has a Republican majority, implied that the measure would encourage partisan gerrymandering rather than curb it, saying the initiative would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering” and “manipulate the boundaries state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio.

The board’s chairman, GOP Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who lost the 2024 GOP primary for U.S. Senate, is a member of the GOP-dominated redistricting commission that has repeatedly voted to the state. three-dimensional maps which gave Republicans large majorities in both chambers: 67% of the seats in the House of Representatives and 69% in the state Senate, although Trump received only 53% of the vote in 2020. The Supreme Court of Ohio invalidated state and U.S. House legislative maps. seven timesbut Republicans like LaRose continued to override the court’s opinions.

The group behind Issue 1, Citizens Not Politicians, led by former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, immediately continued the voting tableasking the Ohio Supreme Court to block “biased, inaccurate, misleading and unconstitutional ballot language.”

But the Ohio Supreme Court, which gained a more conservative Republican majority after O’Connor’s retirement in 2022, has largely approved the misleading language. This led to complaints from Ohio voters that they had been deceived into opposing a redistricting reform initiative that they actually supported.

As Bolts review reported:

When Songgu Kwon went to the polls earlier this month, he was eager to help Ohio pass an independent redistricting commission. The comic book author and illustrator, who lives near Athens, doesn’t like the process with which politicians have carved up Ohio. in congressional and legislative districts who favors them, allow The Republicans will obtain large majorities. So he was pleased that voting rights groups placed Question 1, a proposal intended to create fairer maps, on Ohio’s ballot this fall.

“I support any measure that makes the process fairer to reflect the will of the people, instead of letting politicians decide how to go about the gerrymandering,” Kwon says.

In the voting booth, he examined the text in front of him. His ballot read that voting “yes” would establish a panel “required to change state legislative and congressional district boundaries” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.”

So Kwon voted “no” on the measure – given what he had just read, he thought, this must be the way to show support for independent redistricting. He had left intending to vote “yes,” but was disconcerted by the language he saw; he guessed he must have been wrong or missed a recent development. “The language seemed really specific: If you vote ‘yes,’ you’re for gerrymandering,” he recalls today with frustration.

But as he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly realized that he had made a mistake: he had just voted to preserve the status quo. To implement the new independent process and eliminate redistricting of elected officials, as was his intention, he should have voted “yes.”

These reports of confused voters were widespread. Eight in 10 Ohioans told pollsters they think it’s important that “a political party’s candidate is not always guaranteed to win” when it comes to drawing legislative districts . But when the misleading summary of the vote prepared by the Republican Party was read to voters, support fell precipitously.

The result is a major defeat for democratic reform efforts nationwide. And it was also a sign of how Republicans were using their entrenched power to thwart direct democracy.

This has also happened in other states. In Florida, 57 percent of voters supported a measure to ensure reproductive rights are protected in the state. But it became the first to not to succeed a measure relating to the right to abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade because Florida needs a supermajority of 60 percent to pass a ballot initiative and the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, campaigned against the initiative, even going so far as to send his anti-electoral fraud police at the homes of voters who signed a petition in favor of the right to abortion. This was a brazen abuse of power, but it was part of the Republican Party’s attempt to preserve minority rule.