A Republican member on a panel about gerrymandering at Miami University-Hamilton was met with outrage — expressed through boos and Q&A statements — as he defended Ohio’s current legislative maps.
Roughly 60 community members, professors and students attended the event April 24. When asked, only three members of the audience raised their hands to identify as Republicans, and approximately 10 identified as independent.
The panel featured Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio; David Pepper, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, former member of Cincinnati City Council and former Hamilton County Commissioner; Robert Paduchik, former chair of the Ohio Republican Party, co-chair of the Republican National Committee and senior advisor to the 2020 Trump campaign; and Frank Stigari, attorney and long-time expert on election law and policy. It was designed to provide insight into the current climate of Ohio redistricting.
Stigari defended the current legislative maps in Ohio.
“This system is not broken to the point where we have to scrap the system that we literally just passed over the last ten years,” said Stigari. “I would suggest, and say, that there’s probably some tweaking that we could do.”
Miller, on the other hand, advocated for the wholesale revision of the current mapping system under a proposal developed by the league.
Miller helped LWV draft the Citizens Not Politicians Amendment, which would establish the Ohio Citizens Redistricting Commission composed of five Democrats, five Republicans and five independents, to draw electoral draw maps. Backers are trying to collect 400,000 signatures from Ohio registered voters by the end of June in order to place it on the November 2024 ballot.
Paduchik said he didn’t see a problem with the current legislative districts.
“I don’t think the system is rigged,” Paduchik said. “We have a very transparent system right now.”
Members in the audience audibly scoffed at his statement.
Paduchik went on to say that, “Democrats believe they have a ‘gerrymandering’ problem. They do not have a gerrymandering problem — they have a geography problem, and I’m going to demonstrate that here, right now.”
He pulled out a folded piece of paper. “This, here, is a map of the 2020 presidential election in Ohio. No gerrymandering here, because it’s all on county boundaries. Donald Trump won 81 of Ohio’s 88 counties. The blue counties that he lost are the six urban counties and the county of Athens, Ohio, or where Ohio University is.”
Paduchik claimed that Democrats no longer win the counties along Lake Erie and down Ohio’s eastern side because of a disconnect with working-class rural communities. He predicted that the Citizens Not Politicians Amendment will be like “taking a pizza and putting it over” counties, and “drawing slices out.”
He added, “That’s what your districts are going to look like. They’re going to take pieces of that Democrat slice and draw it into Republican suburbs and try to dilute the vote in that city so that they can get more numbers.”
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled twice in 2022 that Ohio’s maps were unconstitutional, failing to proportionally represent Ohio’s voter makeup. The court struck down existing or proposed maps a total of five times.
After the election, the court upheld maps that give Republicans an advantage in the State House and the State Senate, according to the Statehouse News Bureau. These maps are set to remain in use until 2030, unless there is a change such as that proposed by the League of Women Voters.
Paduchik accused the League of Women Voters of being funded by “dark” and “dirty” money from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which he referred to as the Sixteen Nineteen Group.
The Sixteen Thirty Fund is a U.S.-based lobbying and advocacy group that supports Democrats. The League of Women Voters is a bipartisan group and does not identify as Democratic or Republican.
“Everybody, who is paying to get signatures to get this constitutional amendment on the ballot right now?” Paduchik asked. “Because the money that is going into [the Citizens Not Politicians Amendment] is coming from the Sixteen Nineteen Group, which is funded by foreigners — a foreign billionaire from Switzerland who is paying millions of dollars for people to circulate these petitions to get the constitutional amendment on the ballot.”
“The League of Women Voters has no foreign money,” Miller said.
