Photo: INT.
After the U.S. Supreme Court found major provisions of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, some states are trying to redraw their voting district boundaries before the election. Ohio, which completed the bipartisan process in 2025, likely won’t join the latest mapping effort.
Since the Voting Rights Act (VRA) went into effect decades ago, minority communities have felt confident that they have recourse if they are discriminated against when trying to cast a ballot, but the Supreme Court’s recent 6-3 decision could leave them without representation.
Future elections may look different, at least that’s what voting rights advocate Jen Miller worries about.
“We’ve seen large communities that are being carved up in ways where they don’t really have fair representation,” said Jen Miller of the League of Women Voters of Ohio.
The justices issued their decision in Louisiana v. Callais, invalidating Louisiana’s congressional map, declaring its two majority-Black districts unconstitutional.
“When large swaths of voters are not heard, our democracy will not be as effective,” Miller said.
This radically changes the interpretation of Section 2 of the VRA, which allowed the utilize of certain racial data in drawing congressional and legislative district maps.
“The court has made it really difficult to draw districts in a way that gives blacks or other minorities a real chance to get elected to candidates of their choice,” said Jonathan Entin, a retired nonpartisan constitutional law professor at Case Western Reserve University.
Entin explains that this could allow for a legal challenge to a previously adopted map if racial data was used to create the district.
“We will see Republican efforts to redraw at least some congressional districts in a way that makes it more likely that Republicans will be able to control and win them,” Entin added.
Ohio Republican Party leader Tony Schroeder praised the ruling, saying it was a long time coming. He said that using race to draw districts is actually discriminatory against minorities.
“It actually hurts black voters who may have nothing in common other than race,” said Tony Schroeder, secretary of the Ohio Republican Party.
He approved Ohio’s 2025 mapping process when the state’s redistricting commission unanimously adopted the map with 12-3 GOP support.
The up-to-date map is being called a “compromise” by both Republican and Democratic leaders on the committee, angering both progressives and far-right advocates we spoke to.
Republicans feared a referendum, and Democrats say any other map would be much worse for them.
“Will this ruling impact further GOP redistricting in Ohio?” – I asked Schroeder.
“Well, I think there is some possibility that there will be some legal action on this,” he replied, adding that he didn’t think anything would happen in the brief term that would change Ohio’s maps. “We will see a greater impact on this issue in 2030, when each state will consider redistricting in light of this census.”
Ohio should have some protections against gerrymandering, but some voters like Bria Bennett said politicians continue to violate that law, something the bipartisan Ohio Supreme Court previously agreed with.
“This partisan map, composed of 12 Republicans and three Democrats, is clearly targeted at Black and brown communities,” Bennett said during the committee proceedings.
Unlike other states, Ohio has a schedule for whether and when mid-decade map redrawings are allowed. Under the state constitution, the congressional map set in 2025 will be used for the next six years.
Legal experts say this may now be subject to interpretation.
Miller doesn’t trust any politician to do the right thing when it comes to redistricting, whether it’s a blue or red state. She said politicians should be completely excluded from the process, but in 2024 that effort failed, in part because of what she calls deceitful voting language.
Still, both Schroeder and Miller believe 2030 is the target for further redistricting in the Buckeye State.
Due to the unanimous decision of the redistricting committee and House Speaker Matt Huffman rejecting the Trump administration’s requests gaining more places indicates that Ohio will remain out of the mapmakers’ spotlight — at least for the next few years.
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This article was originally published on News5Cleveland.com and are published in the Ohio Capital Journal under a content sharing agreement. Unlike other OCJ articles, it is not available for free republication on other news outlets because it is owned by WEWS in Cleveland.
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