Susan Tebben, OCJ.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose talks to reporters.
When he loses in court as a criminal defendant or in a presidential election as a defeated incumbent, Donald Trump and his trained lackeys have a ready response: the system was rigged. The jury that found him liable for sexual assault and defaming his victim was rigged. The jury that found him guilty on 34 felony counts was rigged. Presiding judges, prosecuting attorneys, corroborating witnesses, damning evidence, unanimous verdicts. All rigged.
It’s ridiculous, but it’s Trump’s go-to propaganda whenever he strikes out legally, bombs a debate, or comes up short in in a presidential election. He’s already laid the groundwork of a rigged election (that isn’t) in case he loses in 2024 and must recycle old conspiracies about objectively free, fair, historically secure, and remarkably accurate elections administered nationwide with infinitesimal fraud or irregularities.
But if you want to find real rigging of election administration, where craven partisans in high places play dirty to skew voting results on statewide ballot initiatives, by all means, come to Ohio. To borrow from the state’s integrity-is-overrated elections chief Frank LaRose, Ohio is the gold standard in orchestrated party subterfuge to dupe voters and throw elections.
The latest collaborative scheme by the Republican secretary of state, the Republican majority on the Ohio Ballot Board and the Republican majority on the Ohio Supreme Court to turn a November ballot referendum on its head tops the GOP’s trickery last year to (unsuccessfully) tank an abortion rights initiative. This year Republican leaders dropped all pretense of good faith in fashioning and approving the ballot language for the proposed anti-gerrymandering amendment they adamantly oppose.
Issue 1 would kick politicians out of the redistricting process altogether and put a citizen-led panel in charge of the decennial obligation. The Citizens Not Politicians referendum gained traction after the Republican-controlled redistricting commission defied voter-approved amendments to end gerrymandering and ignored court orders to follow the state constitution and make legislative and congressional district maps fairer, more competitive, and more aligned overall with statewide voting.
The redistricting majority drew maps that unconstitutionally favored Republicans over Democrats and produced even bigger gerrymandered supermajorities in the Statehouse with locked in congressional dominance. LaRose, a reliable party line commission vote on the gerrymandered maps, drafted the wording on the anti-gerrymandering proposal, approved by the Republican ballot board majority, and largely upheld by the GOP majority on the state supreme court.
Its rank dishonesty and prejudicial slant surpassed even the distorted ballot language LaRose drafted in 2023 (with anti-abortion lobbyists) to rig the election on the abortion rights amendment. He turned the redistricting proposal, once entitled, “An amendment to replace the current politician-run redistricting process with a citizen-led commission required to create fair state legislative and congressional districts through a more open and independent system” into a cautionary heading that reads “To create an appointed redistricting commission not elected by or subject to removal by the voters of the state.”
The ballot summary is worse. Dissenting Democratic Justice Jennifer Brunner called it “perhaps the most stunningly stilted ballot language that Ohio voters will have ever seen.” It manufactures alternative facts about citizen-powered redistricting to falsely suggest the anti-gerrymandering proposal is what it is not — “a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts.”
That perversion of reality was a bridge too far for Justice Michael Donnelly. The Democrat, who is seeking reelection, blasted the court for giving it a pass and referenced another outrageous majority opinion (authored by Republican Justice Joe Deters, running against Democratic colleague Justice Melody Stewart for a six-year term) that bestowed new meaning to boneless chicken wings. “Given that four members of this court in the majority today apparently think that the word ‘boneless’ means ‘you should expect bones,’ I’m sure it comes as no great surprise that they think that a constitutional amendment to ‘ban partisan gerrymandering’ means to ‘require gerrymander(ing).’”
The complicity of the court in allowing LaRose’s misleading ballot language on redistricting reform to be presented to voters as “an honest explanation of what Issue 1 will do” is beyond the pale of acceptable. But so is LaRose’s rage tweet on the same day he signed off on the deceptive ballot wording voters will read.
“It’s not an anti-gerrymandering measure if it literally REQUIRES gerrymandering, but this is what we’re up against, folks. No matter how much you try to give voters the truth, the left will always have its media machine helping to distort it.” LaRose tried gaslighting with another tweet that “Issue 1 is nothing more than a Democrat power grab that will require gerrymandering so liberal billionaires can take over Congress and Ohio’s legislature.”
He thanked Trump for “speaking out against this dangerous amendment” and attached the disgraced ex-president’s signature (and customized!) propaganda that “Ohio Democrats and left-wing special interest groups” are trying to “rig Elections through the Issue 1 redistricting scam.”
It would be funny if not for the travesty it is; egregious abuse of power by the Republican cabal running state government manifested in weighted, deceitful wording on the ballot summary of another statewide citizens initiative to fool voters and keep the party’s grip on its gerrymandered leverage.
Ohio, The Heart of It All — partisan-choreographed election rigging. For real.
Originally published by the Ohio Capital Journal. Republished here with permission.
