COLUMBUS, Ohio—Gov. Mike DeWine has been criticized for retreating on a promise last year to push for Ohio to adopt a redistricting reform plan based on the state of Iowa’s system.
But a top Democratic lawmaker now says she doesn’t think Ohio should replace its current redistricting system with Iowa’s process, even if such a change was a realistic possibility.
“Our process looks similar to Iowa already, but we’re a different state,” said Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, a Lakewood Democrat, told reporters Tuesday. “We’re bigger. We’re not totally focused on agriculture like they are in Iowa. I mean, they’re very small.”
In July 2024, DeWine said that if Ohio voters rejected a different redistricting reform plan on the November ballot, he would “do everything” he could to get Ohio to adopt Iowa’s redistricting system.
Since 1980, Iowa’s legislative and congressional maps have been drawn by the state legislature’s nonpartisan research agency, then voted on by the Iowa legislature. If no plan passes, the Iowa Supreme Court draws new maps.
“The Iowa plan is simple, it is clear, and it takes politics out of the map-drawing process forever,” the governor said at the time. But even though voters soundly rejected the redistricting ballot issue, DeWine is now just expressing a vague hope that Ohio lawmakers will someday take a look at the idea – a move that, so far, the legislature has not done.
Antonio favored last year’s unsuccessful ballot measure, Issue 1, which would have created an independent redistricting commission picked by a panel of retired judges.
She’s also criticized Republicans for not putting forward a congressional redistricting plan so far this fall, suggesting that the GOP is stalling until November, when state redistricting rules no longer require bipartisan support for a new map to pass.
However, Antonio defended Ohio’s current redistricting rules, under which new legislative maps are drawn by the seven-member Ohio Redistricting Commission and congressional redistricting is passed via a three-phase process that alternates between the legislature and the redistricting commission.
“I think the process that we have from the people, if it was followed, should work,” Antonio said.
Besides the population difference between Ohio (11.8 million people) and Iowa (3.2 million people), Antonio said that, unlike Ohio, Iowa lawmakers are motivated to hammer out bipartisan redistricting maps by the threat of the state Supreme Court drawing new districts.
“As much as I appreciate the governor looking other places for other processes that might work, ultimately, I don’t think that’ll work in Ohio, because we don’t have that in our culture to require us to sit at the table and stay there,” she said.
When Ohio House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn, a Cincinnati Democrat, was asked what he thought about moving to an Iowa-style redistricting system, he didn’t directly answer.
“It doesn’t matter which state you look at for a model,” he said. “The core principle ultimately needs to be that politicians should not be the ones choosing their own voters.”