Erick Trickey is a writer in Boston.

For Americans who want to fight the mapmaker’s tyranny over politics, the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered the classic losers’ consolation: Wait ’til next year. Or the next. Or forever.

The court passed up two chances at the end of its term to declare extreme partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional, sending cases from Wisconsin and Maryland back to lower courts. Then, the justices ducked again, remanding a North Carolina gerrymandering case—and making it less likely they’ll confront partisan district-drawing in their next term. Then Justice Anthony Kennedy retired, depriving gerrymandering’s opponents of a potential fifth vote, without resolving Kennedy’s long search for a legal standard on the practice. It’s a clear message to Americans who are sick of how gerrymandering lets politicians pick their voters, creates grotesquely-shaped one-party districts and encourages the partisan divide. With three years to go before the entire nation redistricts after the next census, if gerrymandering’s opponents want better, fairer maps, they’ll have to demand them, state by state.


Ohio just showed how it can be done.

On May 8, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly for a bipartisan plan, conceived by a GOP-controlled Legislature, that will give the minority party much more say in the drawing of congressional maps starting with the 2021 redistricting. Ohio, a key swing state, is one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation. Yet it came up with a solution, which hasn’t gotten a lot of attention nationally, that could result in fairer maps and more competitive elections for Congress starting in 2022. Ohioans think their reform could be a model for how states can fix gerrymandering on their own, without waiting for the Supreme Court.

“It’s very clear the courts are taking their time to determine that gerrymandering is unconstitutional,” says Catherine Turcer, executive director for Common Cause Ohio, which backed the new law. “We have a very good understanding of the manipulation of district lines. There are very real consequences to rigging elections.”

The anti-gerrymandering movement is growing. “In Ohio and other states, we’ve looked at ways to move the state Legislature to action,” says Turcer. “When we couldn’t, we started collecting signatures for a citizens’ initiative.”

Initiative petitions—a citizens’ right in 24 states—have become a key tool against the gerrymander. Redistricting reform may make the November ballot in Michigan, Utah, Colorado and Missouri. In Ohio, it was a petition drive for reform that pressured state legislators to act. Unlike most initiative proposals, which usually propose independent redistricting commissions, Ohio has kept control of mapmaking with lawmakers, at least until they reach an impasse. It also sets new mapmaking rules to thwart gerrymandering’s worst abuses, such as the use of precise software to create more safe districts for incumbents. It’s a model, say conservative and liberal Ohioans, that could break through partisan impasses over gerrymandering in other states.

“There have to be clear rules to prevent the skullduggery that often happens,” says Ohio state Senator Matt Huffman (pictured), a Republican who helped broker the deal. “It’s designed to force the majority and minority parties to get serious about what they want, to get a deal struck.”

Over the past several decades, Ohio has considered many proposals to reform redistricting. Until recently, they all failed. In 1981, Democrats controlled Ohio’s redistricting, so Republicans allied with good-government groups and proposed a constitutional amendment to give the power to an independent commission. It failed at the polls by a whopping 16-percentage-point margin.

In 2005 and 2012, with Republicans in control, it was the Democrats’ turn to offer similar proposals. Voters rejected them even more strenuously. Turcer, who backed those two proposals, says “almost any problem you frame not as addressing an unfairness but a partisan grab,” tends to lose at the polls. Opponents portrayed reformers as “people not in power who are just whiners,” she says, “or grabbing power, or just greedy.”

Still, Ohio’s 2011 redistricting, controlled by Republicans, had been an example of gerrymandering at its worst. Mischievously, Republicans pitted two incumbent Democrats, Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich, against each other by connecting parts of Toledo and Cleveland, 115 miles apart, into a thin congressional district along Lake Erie that came to be nicknamed the “snake along the lake.”

Ohio has voted for the winner of every presidential election since 1964. It leans slightly Republican, but Democrats have a shot: Trump beat Clinton there by 8 points, while Obama beat Romney by 2 points in 2012 and McCain by 4 in 2008. Yet the 2011 Republican mapmakers, working in secret in a Columbus hotel suite, divided the state into 12 Republican-leaning congressional districts and four Democratic-leaning districts. The previous map had been gerrymandered less ruthlessly, creating five swing districts that changed hands between 2006 and 2010. Not so with the new map, which has performed as designed, producing 12-4 Republican congressional delegations in 2012, 2014 and 2016. Republicans won 62 percent of the state’s congressional elections from 2002 to 2010; they’ve won 75 percent of them since. “You get at a point where the mapmakers have more to say about who gets elected than the voters,” says Turcer.

The ugly map led to regrets on the Republican side too. Huffman, who authored the 2011 redistricting and took part in the campaign against the 2012 reform proposal, came out thinking there had to be a better way. “I remember saying there aren’t any parameters,” Huffman says. “People can’t look and say, ‘That’s the rules.’” Even as he raised money to defeat the 2012 ballot initiative, he heard pressure for a different solution. “What I heard from Republican groups was, ‘Hey, we’re against this, we’ll help contribute to beat that, but we don’t want to keep doing this every five to 10 years.’”

In November 2014, Huffman proposed reforms that would give the minority party a say in redistricting. After a month of negotiations during the Legislature’s lame-duck session, legislators reached a rare bipartisan agreement on a constitutional amendment: Starting in 2021, state House and state Senate districts will be drawn by a seven-member, bipartisan commission. If two members of the minority party don’t vote for a map, it’ll be in effect for only four years, not 10. Voters approved the amendment in 2015.

But congressional redistricting was left out of the deal. Democrats blamed Ohio’s own John Boehner, then speaker of the U.S. House, for keeping the reform from applying to the all-important congressional elections. So liberal and good-government groups launched a petition drive in 2017 that proposed a constitutional amendment to apply the reform to the congressional map. “Once we got to about 100,000 validated signatures,” says Turcer, “the state Legislature started having conversations.”

Legislators struck a new deal: a four-step process for redistricting, meant to encourage bipartisan mapmaking. In Round 1, the Legislature draws a map that would need a 60 percent supermajority and votes from 50 percent of the minority party to pass. If that doesn’t happen, redistricting goes to the same commission that writes the state legislative maps, where it needs two minority-party votes to pass. If the commission can’t agree, redistricting returns to the state Legislature, where a map could pass with one-third of the minority party’s support. Or, the majority could pass a map on its own—but that map would be valid for four years, not 10.

The reform also creates new rules for compact districts and transparent mapmaking. Rules limit how many of Ohio’s 88 counties can be split up. That’ll prevent grotesque map shapes like the “snake along the lake,” as well as most individual requests to move a town or a corporate headquarters into a certain district.

“We wanted to make sure we weren’t dividing communities,” says Huffman, “and that individual interests, whether a person or interest group, wouldn’t be able to come in and easily say, ‘Let’s put the line there because it’s good for me and what I want.’”

The armistice was strategic: Republicans and Democrats could both focus money and time on candidates in the November elections, not redistricting. Reform groups would win changes to the rules before the 2020 Census rather than take their chances on the ballot with a more sweeping reform.

“Our [plan] is very pragmatic, which will not be appealing to some folks,” says Turcer. “But Ohioans are a pragmatic people, and we’ve been at this for a very, very long time.”

Skeptics say the new law doesn’t go far enough. The ACLU of Ohio declined to support the ballot proposal, saying it still allows for partisan gerrymandering. But both parties endorsed the reforms. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, contributed $50,000 to the campaign for it, and Holder spoke in favor of it at a public appearance in Columbus. “We just want the system to be fair, so Democrats can compete on a level playing field,” says Kelly Ward, executive director of the NDRC. “Any effort that gets us closer to that, we want to be supportive. We want to move the needle a step in the right direction.”

Neither side thinks Ohio’s 2021 mapmaking will be easy. Turcer says her coalition plans to recruit “an army of citizen mapmakers” to hold the Legislature and redistricting commission accountable. “It’ll be ugly,” says Huffman, “a lot of the usual back and forthing and press conferences.” But he thinks both sides will eventually agree on a 10-year map that’ll be fairer than today’s lines.

For now, the anti-gerrymandering movement’s focus is shifting to other states. Michigan, Ohio’s northern neighbor, just certified an initiative proposal for November’s ballot, though it still faces a challenge at the state Supreme Court. The Michigan proposal would create an independent citizens commission to draw future maps. “No matter where we were in the state, no matter who we talked to, people see a huge conflict of interest with politicians drawing their own political lines,” says Katie Fahey, the founder of Voters Not Politicians, the group behind the initiative.

In the 26 states that don’t allow for citizens’ initiatives, fighting gerrymandering will be harder. Reformers say sustained pressure from ordinary people will be the key to fixing gerrymandering without the federal courts’ help. “In states where the Legislature makes those decisions, we all really need to lean in on elected officials, who can, prior to 2021, make the criteria and process more fair,” says Ward. “Then, once the redistricting process starts in 2021, we need a full court press of democracy to get officials to do the right thing.”

