Transcript

784: Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make Me a Map

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Prologue: Prologue

Ira Glass

OK, so this week, like the rest of us, Ohio is going to the polls. And in Ohio, there are more people who vote Republican there, but not a lot more. Donald Trump and Barack Obama each carried the state twice.

If the Congressional delegation reflected the breakdown of Democratic and Republican voters in the state, they would have eight Republicans and seven Democrats sitting in the House of Representatives. But right now, it is not that. There are not seven Democrats. There are four. And that's probably the best outcome the Democrats can hope for in this week's election. In fact, they could do worse, which, of course, would hurt the Democrats' chances for holding control of the US House of Representatives.

And why, you may ask, are Democrats only going to take two or three or four seats and not seven? At one level, it doesn't have anything to do with the issues or politics or Biden or anything like that. It really just comes down to gerrymandering.

The districts are drawn to favor the Republicans, mostly by smashing lots of Democrats into just a few districts, giving Republicans majorities in the rest of them. In Ohio, those districts are about as bad as they come. But here's what's different about Ohio.

A few years back, something very unusual happened. Republicans and Democrats came together, and they said, enough. They changed the state's constitution so the districts would be drawn fairly at last. 70% of voters in 2015 and 2018 approved this. Arnold Schwarzenegger-- he's fought against gerrymandering going back to when he was governor of California. He tweeted a congratulatory video.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

And I also want to congratulate the legislators, Democrats and Republicans alike, for coming together, and all of you together have terminated gerrymandering in Ohio. That's fantastic.

Ira Glass

Hard not to love how on-brand that guy is.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

That's a huge victory, getting rid of gerrymandering, which is the worst thing in America.

Ira Glass

It was a rare kumbaya political moment. The Republican governor of Ohio, John Kasich, was praising Democrats and voters rights groups, making idealistic speeches.

John Kasich

Listen, this is incredible, what they did. We're now a model for the country, and it just means we're going to have fair elections. They're going to be more competitive. Why does this issue matter so much? Well, because when you draw lines in such a way that only one party can win the district, it creates a polarizing effect.

Ira Glass

That's because, he says, when candidates don't have to worry about voters from the other party voting them out, their views get more extreme. They play to their base, court voters from their own party with whatever red meat issues are popular.

John Kasich

And that means we move farther and farther apart as a nation. And it all leads to-- [COUGHS] excuse me-- getting nothing done. This is really big time. This is the beginning of an effort to end all this polarization, get people to communicate, to listen to one another. That's what this is about.

Ira Glass

And so the new rules of map making went into effect. Ohio headed into the utopian post-gerrymandering world where people would communicate and polarization would shrink, at least a little. And in 2021, they got their very first chance to draw new completely fair maps, the maps for the election that we are holding this month and for the decade ahead. And then, a funny thing happened.

Reporter 1

Ohio's newly drawn legislative maps have now been deemed invalid and, in fact, unconstitutional.

Ira Glass

The Ohio Supreme Court said the maps drawn by Republican mapmakers were gerrymandered still. They didn't do the basic things they just enacted a constitutional amendment to do. But OK, everybody knows it's hard for old dogs to learn new tricks. Partisans will be partisans, maybe to be expected. Slapped down by the court, lawmakers got another shot. They redrew the maps. Weeks later--

Reporter 2

Well, now to breaking political news tonight. Ohio's Supreme Court is sending Ohio's House and Senate back to the drawing board again. Today the Supreme Court ruled the state's redistricting maps as unconstitutional for the second time in less than a month. Well, now--

Ira Glass

That was February. Lawmakers tried again to draw an ungerrymandered map. And in March--

Reporter 3

Welcome into Action News at 4 on this St Patrick's Day. And the third time not a lucky charm for Ohio Republican mapmakers.

Reporter 4

The state Supreme Court overturned another set of general assembly maps late Thursday night.

Ira Glass

I'm sure you see where this is going. April.

Reporter 5

Well, 10 TV news at 5 begins with several breaking news stories tonight. We start at the Ohio Supreme Court. There, the justices struck down redistricting maps as gerrymandered for the fourth time.

Ira Glass

And then, May.

Reporter 6

The Ohio Supreme Court rejecting legislative maps for a fifth time.

Ira Glass

OK, yes, in all, the maps of Ohio State House were rejected five times. And then, on top of that, when it came to its representatives to the US Congress, those districts were rejected twice. And then, time ran out. There's no more time to redraw any maps. Because of all that, Ohio is going to be going to the polls this week with maps its Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional-- illegal, just deeply gerrymandered.

How did they end up here? How is that even possible? Well, that's a story I'm here to tell you today. A bunch of states are going to the polls this week with gerrymandered districts that heavily favor one side over the other. But in Ohio this year, it wasn't supposed to be that way.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's "This American Life." I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us, voters.

Act One: They made each other a pledge. Unheard of. Absurd.

Ira Glass

Act one-- They made each other a pledge. Unheard of. Absurd. OK, so when I first started looking into this, one of the things I really didn't understand was how did Ohio end up with this constitutional amendment at all to fix the way they draw districts. After all, if you think about it, whichever party was in power, they had no motive at all to want to change.

Democrats, in fact, happily gerrymandered for years and years, and they killed gerrymandering reform in Ohio-- most recently, back in 2010. Lately, of course, it's been the Republicans drawing unfair districts. The majorities are so overwhelming at this point, the Senate president has said, publicly, "We can kind of do what we want," which is true.

Republican supermajorities in Ohio pass laws like, for example, the one that banned abortion, even in the case of rape and incest. In June, you probably remember this led to a 10-year-old Ohio girl who'd been raped to have to go to Indiana for an abortion.

David Pepper

In a state that a majority supports Roe v. Wade, I dare say 5% or fewer Ohioans agree with how that 10-year-old was treated.

Ira Glass

David Pepper used to run the Democratic Party in the state, but became so alarmed at the kinds of laws he saw the Republican supermajority passing and the way they rigged maps to stay in power, that he wrote a book, Laboratories of Autocracy, documenting it.

David Pepper

It's a state that only a few months ago passed a bill because they were so worried about trans athletes that said that, on demand, girls playing on sports teams and of all ages should on demand have genital inspections-- genital inspections. But that extremism does not reflect the people. Very few people would support it.

Same with guns-- this is a state that the vast majorities would support background checks. The legislature passes laws where only 10% or so agree with them. And so the gerrymandering is, again, not just about a unearned majority control. It's what is fueling the extremism and behavior from politicians that I think most Americans can't understand. It's about no competition whatsoever.

Ira Glass

So whoever's in power has good reasons to keep gerrymandering. And in Ohio, whenever anybody has tried to stop them, they've failed. It's been a long history of hard fought battles going back to the early '80s. Catherine Turcer, who runs one of the do-gooder groups that's active on this issue, Common Cause Ohio, she jumped into the fight in the 1990s when she first heard about gerrymandering and got hooked.

Catherine Turcer

You know, at first, it just sounds like some kind of weird conspiracy, something that happens every 10 years behind closed doors, and it's--

Ira Glass

Nearly everybody you're going to hear this hour has some moment like this, where the arcane details of political redistricting took over their lives. In the '90s, Catherine gathered signatures to put a constitutional amendment on the Ohio ballot, which takes hundreds of thousands of signatures. They couldn't collect enough. She worked on the statewide campaign, and they tried again in 2005. This time, they got on the ballot, and voters rejected them horribly-- 70% to 30%. Tried again in 2012, lost again, similar margin. Catherine describes what that feels like this way.

Catherine Turcer

I had to-- I was in a really terrible car accident, and I had to relearn to walk. And--

Ira Glass

Wow.

Catherine Turcer

--I've recovered from cancer. I have gotten a divorce. None of them are as awful as losing a ballot measure.

Ira Glass

Wait, a divorce-- I just want to go through the list again. A divorce--

Catherine Turcer

[LAUGHS]

Ira Glass

--cancer, and getting in a terrible car accident where you have to learn to walk afterwards--

Catherine Turcer

Yes.

Ira Glass

--not as bad as losing a ballot measure.

Catherine Turcer

Because you just have to do it all over again.

Ira Glass

And why did you lose so badly, like if this is just sort of sensible good government, let's have fair district lines?

Catherine Turcer

So the opposition-- oh my gosh, they spent so much money-- just talked about how crazy the redistricting map would be, and then they spent millions of dollars-- basically things like faceless bureaucrats are going to draw the district lines. Oh, and they're going to spend unlimited amounts of money on this mapmaking process. You have no idea how much money they're going to be spending.

Ira Glass

So the year all this partisanship ended, or at least paused, and all the parties sat down to fix mapmaking in Ohio, was 2014. And there are a bunch of reasons that it happened that year. One big reason-- the map that the Republicans had just drawn in the last round of map making was so undeniably lopsided, some of the laws the new majority started passing were more inflammatory than in the past, especially this measure to try to bust up public unions, which led to protests and a ballot measure.

After that, a lot more people took notice of how weird the districts looked. Republicans started worrying that the Democrats and the good government groups were going to bring a ballot measure to change the constitution and end gerrymandering. And of course, they defeated these kinds of measures in the past, but this time, there was one new factor that was going to make it harder.

And to explain that part, let me just introduce you to the mastermind behind the Republican strategy in Ohio when it comes to redistricting and map drawing, one of the leading Republicans in the state, Matt Huffman. Back when he and I spoke, I was still trying to figure out who was the person who first had the idea for the 2015 constitutional amendment to curtail gerrymandering, like who is the person who got everybody else on board. Somebody had told me that it was Catherine Turcer, the woman from Common Cause. Matt Huffman was very clear on this point.

Matt Huffman

It was not Catherine Turcer. It was not Catherine Turcer. It was a young state representative Matt Huffman who introduced this, and I'll tell you why-- personally, why I ended up doing that.

Ira Glass

That checks out, by the way, with people who are close to the process. Matt Huffman says all this began after he fought to stop one of those ballot initiatives to get rid of gerrymandering. This is the one in 2012, the second one in 10 years.

Matt Huffman

People spend a lot of money saying, yes, no, this is outrageous, gerrymandering. And I went around the state, and I raised money and lots of folks said, gee, we seem to be doing this a lot. We'll give you money, but isn't there anything you can do so we don't have to keep having this fight every three or four years?

Ira Glass

Yeah, the thing that I had heard was that the Chamber of Commerce said, like, we shouldn't be spending our money on this. We should be spending money on races and getting people to win. And that's right?

Matt Huffman

Yeah, well, that's a-- I mean, I'm not recalling a specific conversation in the Chamber of Commerce, but those, typically Republican, groups. People did say to me in 2012, we're not going to write checks for this anymore. Go solve the problem. Can't you come up with some compromise? We almost had one in 2010, the Republicans in the Senate. And I said, yeah, but the Democrats wouldn't do it. Well, maybe they'll do it now. So, OK, I'm going to take a shot at it.

Ira Glass

Huffman sees himself as somebody who almost compulsively wants to jump at a problem and try to solve it, and even his opponents say that he is an enormously creative legislator. Back then, he'd just been through hearings where Democrats and Republicans both talked about what they'd want to see in a constitutional reform of gerrymandering.

And he and everybody else saw possibilities for compromise. So five negotiators went into a room in the State House for secret talks that one of them told me lasted 39 hours. Huffman and the bigwigs in the parties signed on, and the two sides came to relatively quick agreement-- on some of the rules, anyway-- for map drawing that now appear in the Constitution.

Districts have to be as compact as possible. They shouldn't sprawl out in weird shapes. Whenever possible, if there's a township or county, it should all sit in one district, or if it's too big for that, in two districts, with as few divisions in it as possible. I was told by other negotiators that last item was very important to Matt Huffman during the negotiations.

And when I talked to him, he said that particular item was helpful to him personally as the guy in charge of drawing the Republican political maps, and not because it helped him fight Democrats. I thought this actually gave a fascinating glimpse into what it is like to be a political boss like him, trying to keep his allies in line and on the same page.

Matt Huffman

Much of the problem with redistricting is not party versus party. It's intraparty wrangling and ridiculous demands made by legislators about having this county in their district-- or their hometown.

Ira Glass

Mm-hmm.

Matt Huffman

And it's not-- it's not fair. It's not realistic. I want to have that township because that's where my daughter lives or my restaurant is there, or I at least want to be included in that congressional district because-- and this happened because I may want to run for Congress because I think that guy is going to retire. We can say, we're not allowed to do that because we're not allowed to split townships in half. And it's an answer to a lot of bad behavior on both sides of the aisle.

Ira Glass

Meanwhile, what Democrats and good government groups wanted in the constitution was something to guarantee that the district maps would not favor one party over another. And they knew it wasn't enough just to say the words, "You can't favor one party over another."

Florida put that wording into its constitution, and it was vague enough that it led to years of lawsuits. So these people in Ohio wanted some kind of measurement in the constitution, some way to determine whether a map was fair or not that everybody agreed to. Catherine explains what they came up with.

Catherine Turcer

Essentially, what's in the Ohio constitution is that we look at the statewide elections over the past decade. So in 10 years, those statewide races-- and you can think of president. You can think of senator, governor, et cetera. You take all of those. You put them together, meaning you add up the Democratic votes, and you add up the Republican votes.

Ira Glass

I mean, you do that in Ohio, you see that 46% of the votes that people cast were for Democrats over the last 10 years. 54% were for Republicans. And so 46% of its state house districts should be districts with more Democrats in them, and 54% of those districts should have more Republicans. One of the five negotiators, former political science professor Richard Gunther, came up with this idea, which he calls proportional representation.

Richard Gunther

Meaning that the share of seats leaning towards one party or another should closely correspond to the share of votes cast for those two parties. So you're starting from a level playing field.

Ira Glass

So you invent this thing.

Richard Gunther

Yep. It is not in any constitution of any state in the US.

Ira Glass

Any state but Ohio.

When voters overwhelmingly approved the new rules, the Democrats and good government types were cautiously optimistic, like Catherine Turcer. She said they all knew it wasn't perfect. They made compromises. It was the only way to get it passed.

Catherine Turcer

There might be a few games, but that these elected officials would do their best to meet the rules.

Ira Glass

I understand that, but emotionally, did you just feel like, we did it? We had this goal, and we and we won. Did you feel like that?

Catherine Turcer

Oh my gosh. Not only did I think we won, I was like, I could retire. It was like, oh my goodness, there's like light at the end of the tunnel. And I feel sad for that girl, you know, that person.

Ira Glass

You feel sad for 2015 Catherine Turcer.

Catherine Turcer

[LAUGHS] Yes, 2015 Catherine Turcer who believed that we had set the stage for truly meaningful elections.

Ira Glass

Coming up-- what goes wrong when Ohio tries out its new constitutional amendment and draws its very first maps under the rules? That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Act Two: Sunrise Sunset

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program-- Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make Me a Map, the story of why Ohio is going to the polls this week with election maps the state's own Supreme Court says violate the state's constitution. We have arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two-- Sunrise, Sunset slash Is This the Little Constitutional Amendment I Carried?

OK, so in 2021, Ohioans sat down to make the electoral maps for the election that we're holding this week, using their new constitutional amendment for the very first time, taking it out for a spin. And as you already know, what unfolded was kind of a disaster.

They had to make three maps in all. One of those was defining congressional districts for the US House of Representatives, then two maps for the Ohio State House, one for the Ohio Senate, one for the Ohio House of Representatives. OK, so three maps, similar things happen with all three.

And I'm going to tell you the story of what happened with the map for the Ohio House of Representatives because it was the most bitterly divisive. And also, there are things in gerrymandering that usually happen all the time around the country behind closed doors that here play out in public. And it took some pretty shocking turns along the way.

Mike DeWine

And I call this meeting to order. We'll now proceed to the presentation of a member appointments to the Ohio redistricting commission.

Ira Glass

The new constitutional amendment created a redistricting commission with seven members to draw the state's electoral maps. This was their first meeting in August of last year. Seven members mandated by the amendment were some of the most powerful people in the state-- the governor, secretary of state, and auditor, and then from the state legislature, two Republican lawmakers and two Democrats.

Matt Huffman, the Republican who was behind the amendment's creation, he was on the committee, still calling the shots. He was also by this time a state senator and president of the Ohio Senate. Vernon Sykes was the leading Democrat on the commission and its co-chair. He'd been the Democratic party's main negotiator, Huffman's counterpart when they were drafting the constitutional amendment.

Sykes is such a hardcore anti-gerrymandering guy that in his first term in office back in 1983, he went to the Democrats, who at that point were running things-- they were the majority. He went to the leaders of his own party and told them it was unfair the way that they were drawing the maps. They should change.

Vernon Sykes

It was a difficult row to hoe and really couldn't convince them to do that.

Ira Glass

Like, did they say, like, are you crazy?

Vernon Sykes

Yeah, that was basically the terminology that was used. They thought I was naive and young and inexperienced and-- and I would get over it.

Ira Glass

Obviously, he did not get over it, and now here he sat, four decades later. In all, it was five Republicans on the committee, two Democrats. Mapmaking got a late start in Ohio because the new census data was late. But then, finally, on September 9 of last year--

Matt Huffman

Mr. Co-Chair?

Vernon Sykes

Yes.

Matt Huffman

I would-- pursuant to Rule 10 of the commission, I would like to present to the commission a proposed General Assembly district plan for all 99 seats of the Ohio House of Representatives and all 33 seats of the Ohio Senate.

Ira Glass

That's Matt Huffman proposing maps that have been cooked up by the Republicans on their own. The new constitutional amendment actually calls for everybody on the commission to draft this map together, but Republicans said that the census data came in too late for that-- no time to collaborate. Democrats and the government types said that was nonsense. So this first map was like a cannon shot launching the war that followed.

Matt Huffman

Thank you. At this time, we are ready for the presentation.

Ira Glass

The single most important thing about the map that anybody would want to know-- did it favor one party more than another? The Republicans didn't give any information about that at all in this first hearing. And mind you, they were doing all this at the very last minute. There were only six days before the constitution said they had to approve some map.

Given the way the constitution was written, like we said earlier, 54% of Ohioans had been voting Republican over the previous decade, so most people figured that 54% of the districts should have Republican majorities. When the numbers were finally revealed, Republicans got a lot more than that. The map gave Republicans between 64% and 70% of all the districts. I asked a few people who are at these hearings to talk me through what they were like.

Katy Shanahan was there working with a group called the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. She personally had locked in on gerrymandering as her issue when she was in law school. She wrote a thesis evaluating how different states draw their maps and which are the most fair. Like everybody I spoke with, she expected the Republicans to try to gerrymander, you know, like, a little. But this first map--

Katy Shanahan

It's sort of impressive, [LAUGHS] in a bad way, that they managed to draw maps that were even worse than the ones that we had in place the last 10 years. After having helped write and pass a constitutional reform meant to curb that exact type of gerrymandering, the audacity of their action is breathtaking, no matter how predictable.

Matt Huffman

The simple fact is that there are a lot of opinions about what that portion of the constitution means. For example--

Ira Glass

During the hearings, Senator Huffman explained the number of Republican districts this way. He said that, under the constitution, the number of districts that each party gets is supposed to reflect the results in statewide elections over the previous 10 years. And results is the word the constitution uses-- results. But Huffman says, there are different ways that you can measure election results.

Like, for instance, you can count the number of votes cast. If you do that, then Republicans won 54% of the votes, sure. But he said you could also count the number of races won-- governor, lieutenant governor, senator, all that. If you count the number of races, if you do it that way, Republicans won 81% of the races.

Again, Katy Shanahan.

Katy Shanahan

And the explanation was, essentially, so we really could have gotten way worse maps, right? We could have drawn maps that gave us 81% of the seats, and that would have been fair. But we didn't do that, and isn't that so gracious of us to do that? And that was their explanation.

Ira Glass

Yeah, what did you think of that argument?

Katy Shanahan

Well, excuse my French, but it's horseshit. Election results, I mean, I guess you could read that multiple ways. But to me, what that reads is, how have Ohioans voted in all of those races? If you're only counting who's won those elections, you're ignoring all of the other voters.

So there are some of those statewide races that were decided by a couple percentage points, which means you're essentially ignoring half of the voters who showed up to vote in those elections, which is not what I think what statewide preferences of the voters of Ohio means. It doesn't mean only count who's won those races and disregard everyone else who voted.

Ira Glass

I will say, the Democrats and good government types who negotiated the terms of this constitutional amendment with Matt Huffman found this interpretation of the word "results" to be so annoying. Like, they were there when this was written. Again, Catherine Turcer.

Catherine Turcer

And the notion that Matt Huffman didn't understand what representational fairness is is absolutely ludicrous. There were long conversations about it for years, really.

Ira Glass

Richard Gunther said the same thing. Remember, he was one of the five negotiators who hammered out the terms of the amendment. He says, whenever they talked about election results, it was always about the number of votes, never about the number of races won.

Richard Gunther

No, that was never mentioned. And in fact, I've been a professional political scientist for five decades, and I've never seen election data used in that bizarre fashion.

Ira Glass

Matt Huffman totally sticks by his guns in this one. He told me the word in the constitution is "results." This notion that it means counting votes and not offices won--

Matt Huffman

Well, why does the results mean that? Well, because I want it to? Because it's better for me? Well, those aren't really reasons. Well, you know--

Ira Glass

But they're saying-- they're saying, just, that's what everybody talked about back then. Nobody talked about counting the number of offices.

Matt Huffman

Yeah, then it should be in the constitution. This is like the agreement, right? We enter into a settlement agreement to settle our lawsuit, and later on, you say, well, on the side, you said you were paying court costs. I never said that.

Ira Glass

Mm-hmm.

Matt Huffman

Or on the side, I was supposed to get an extra $10,000. Remember, you mentioned it to me just before we signed the document? No. And so that's why we have the constitution and the votes--

Ira Glass

And you're saying the language-- the language-- the language doesn't specify. So it could be either one.

Matt Huffman

Right.

Frank LaRose

Yeah, Mr. President, so I've been trying to understand, as we've been talking to members of your staff and you yourself, how you believe that your--

Ira Glass

In hearings over this, even the other Republicans on the redistricting commission seem to have trouble with Matt Huffman's rationale for this map. This is Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, and as he is saying these words, the committee is in the final hour-- like, literally, it's the final hour before the constitutional deadline for approving a map. It's minutes before midnight on September 15.

LaRose is complaining that Huffman and his staff didn't even share information with other Republicans on the committee, never gave any explanation until then for why there were so many more Republican districts than the constitution seemed to allow.

Frank LaRose

I, for one, have been asking for the rationale for days. Is there a reason why that wasn't shared with us until now?

Ira Glass

LaRose texted his chief of staff, quote, "This rationale is asinine. I should vote no." This came out in depositions a month later.

Matt Huffman

Further discussion on the motion. Governor DeWine?

Ira Glass

Ohio's Republican Governor Mike DeWine also seemed concerned about how far Huffman had gone.

Mike DeWine

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am deeply disappointed where we are tonight. I know-- I know that this committee could have produced a more clearly constitutional bill, but that's not the bill that we have in front of us. And I'm sorry we did not do that.

Ira Glass

The governor and secretary of state both turned down a request for interviews. The commission didn't finally vote till after midnight, so they missed that deadline set by the constitution.

Clerk

Co-Chair Senator Sykes.

Vernon Sykes

No.

Clerk

Co-Chair Speaker Cupp.

Robert Cupp

Yes.

Clerk

Governor DeWine?

Ira Glass

Even Republicans who were critical of the maps voted for them. They passed on party lines-- 5 to 2. This is challenged in court, and the Ohio Supreme Court did not buy Huffman's explanation at all about the definition of the word "results." They ruled the map unconstitutional-- back to the drawing board.

Republicans created a second set of maps, again, on their own, again, with no input from the Democrats on the committee. This time, they tried something different. They gave the Democrats a few more districts that leaned their way but not as many as the Supreme Court called for. But there was a new problem, which the court pointed out when they rejected this set of maps.

A third of the Democratic seats were just barely Democratic. Like, really, these seats were toss-ups, where Democrats had just a tiny fraction more voters than Republicans, like less than half of 1% more voters in most of the cases. Again, David Pepper used to chair the Democratic Party in the state.

David Pepper

What the Supreme Court said correctly was, the only seats that were at risk of being lost were Democratic seats. That is not a fair map. You need to have in your side as many competitive seats as Democrats do.

Ira Glass

The Supreme Court said no to the second map because it violated the part of the constitution that says a map can't, quote, "favor or disfavor one party over another." The court gave the commission 10 days to try again. And the commission didn't meet until the 10th day, the very last day, February 17, 2022. And this time--

Katy Shanahan

The commission just didn't pass a map.

Ira Glass

Again, Katy Shanahan.

Katy Shanahan

The Republicans never offered any map. They just didn't do it. And they filed with the court, saying, yeah, sorry, we just reached an impasse. We don't know-- we don't know how to get around it, you know? We don't know how to make you all happy on the court. The Democrats don't want to agree to any of our maps. So I guess we're just not going to have a map.

Frank LaRose

The mapmakers, the majority mapmakers, are telling us that they don't believe that we can constitutionally do what the court majority has asked us to do.

Ira Glass

This is Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose at that February hearing.

Frank LaRose

This is one of those classic cases of what we want versus what we can accomplish. Those who are looking to cast blame and score political points will perhaps represent that the situation we're in is simply because of a lack of will. I don't believe that that's the case.

Ira Glass

Just to be clear about this, the Republicans are right when they say that it's not so easy to make a map for Ohio that gives Democrats nearly half the districts like the constitution mandates. Because like in many states, the Democrats in Ohio are mostly bunched up in the big cities. In lots of counties, there just aren't so many of them.

So to give them enough districts without breaking any of the other rules, like splitting up counties and townships, it's tricky. Democrats, however, and nonpartisan groups like the League of Women Voters say it isn't that hard a problem. That same day, February 17, the Democrats introduced a map that they made that gave them the number of districts that the Supreme Court said would be constitutionally correct.

Allison Russo

All other requirements of the constitution are met. No one has shown constitutional violations in these maps, so I urge a yes vote for adoption of the maps that have been proposed in this motion.

Ira Glass

The Republicans disagreed about the constitutionality and spent a lot of the hearing trying to shoot holes in the map. Their biggest beef-- Matt Huffman said that this map made so many districts of incumbent Republicans vanish, so many that it disfavored one party in a way that the constitution prohibits.

Democrats replied that so many Republican districts were vanishing because they'd been unfairly gerrymandered in the first place. At the end of the hearing, the Republicans voted down the Democrats' map, like they did with every Democratic map offered during all these hearings, and decided to notify the state Supreme Court that no map could possibly be drawn to comply with the constitution.

Katy Shanahan

And they just sort of crossed their hands and went with the impasse. Which was fairly astounding because you know, a court order is nothing to scoff off. It's the highest court in our state demanding that you redraw a map. And the commissioners just said-- yeah, no, we're not gonna do that. And had no qualms about not only doing that, but then filing paperwork with the court to explain-- yeah, we're just not gonna follow your court order.

And of the five Republican commissioners, four of them are barred attorneys who swear an oath to uphold the constitution of the United States and of Ohio, and to have respect and deference to courts who have jurisdiction over your actions, and that's how you're going to behave, you're just gonna cross your arms and say, yeah, no, I'm not gonna comply with that that court order. It's appalling.

Ira Glass

Seven days later, the Ohio Supreme Court issued an order for the commissioners to appear in person and explain why they should not be held in contempt for not turning in a map as ordered. Again, Katy Shanahan.

Katy Shanahan

And what's so wild about the timing of that-- so that order came out on February 24. And later that same day, Republican commissioners managed to propose a new map and pass it almost along party lines.

Ira Glass

Hmm.

Katy Shanahan

Which is fascinating, because they had just argued in court why they couldn't possibly come up with a new map. And yet, fewer than 24 hours after the court said, OK, well, then you should come into court and explain why you didn't-- why you shouldn't be held in contempt, they managed to figure out how to draw a new one.

Ira Glass

And was the new map very different?

Katy Shanahan

No, it was not very different. It was largely the same. They made the seat count perhaps a little more palatable, but essentially, one of the driving--

Ira Glass

In fact, the new map finally got to a 54-46 split between Republican and Democratic leaning districts like the court wanted. But just like the previous Republican map, lots of the Democratic seats-- in fact, nearly half of them, 19 seats, were just barely Democratic. They were toss-ups. None of the Republican seats were toss-ups. They were all solid red.

So the Supreme Court ordered the commission to go back and try it one more time. This is now the fourth time. And this time, the court suggested a complete revamp, like a total rethinking of how they were going about this. The court pointed out that one big problem with all these maps was that the Democrats and Republicans didn't draft them together as a group, like the constitution tells them to.

So the court said, try drafting a map together from scratch in public. Hire an independent mapmaker to help, somebody who will answer to all the commission members, not just to the Republicans. And incredibly, that's what happens next.

Vernon Sykes

At this time, we'll call up the mapmakers.

Ira Glass

They hire two independent mapmakers, one picked by the Democrats and one picked by the Republicans.

Vernon Sykes

We've been waiting a long time to have this opportunity to actually talk with you. Could you just do a brief introduction, please?

Ira Glass

This is the one time in all the hearing footage that I've watched that I've seen co-chair Vernon Sykes allow a faint smile to cross his face. And the commission puts the two to work, in a room in the capitol with cameras and microphones, broadcasting onto the internet with separate feeds that show what was on their computer screens. Senator Sykes was proud of it.

Vernon Sykes

It was totally an open process, live streamed. 24/7, around the clock, this room was broadcast.

Ira Glass

Mm-hmm.

Vernon Sykes

We could hear conversations. This was unheard of in any state anywhere.

Ira Glass

And so do you feel like, OK, it's been a bumpy road, but finally there's real hope that this will work out the way that you had wanted from the beginning?

Vernon Sykes

Absolutely, absolutely.

Allison Russo

I mean, it was Ohio's version of reality television. You know, for all the data and map nerds and redistricting nerds--

Ira Glass

This is the other Democrat on the redistricting commission, Allison Russo, the Democratic leader in the Ohio House of Representatives. Russo's first entrance into politics in Ohio, years before this, was collecting signatures for redistricting reform at her local public library. So she especially loved this new path they were on. She watched the live stream.

Allison Russo

Everybody did. We all did. I mean, one of the more entertaining aspects was really just the personalities of the two mapmakers and how they interacted with each other. And there were moments of tension.

Mapmaker Doug

So-- so let's not--

Mapmaker Michael

There's no discussion.

Mapmaker Doug

So let's not--

Mapmaker Michael

There's no discussion. But it-- but when it came to Green--

Mapmaker Doug

You don't get to say there's no discussion and then keep discussing.

Mapmaker Michael

I wasn't saying there was no--

Ira Glass

There were also long stretches where they got along. They drank lots of Coke, ate on camera. Michael the Democrat was somebody who seemed utterly uninterested in small talk. Doug the Republican was friendly, chatty. Here, he's looking at his phone.

Mapmaker Doug

[LAUGHS] My daughter-- she texted me saying, "The guinea pigs have been enjoying you guys." [LAUGHS]

Ira Glass

Michael, all business, says nothing. Typical. Doug turns to the camera, does a quick wave and a smile, gets back to work. In just four long days, these two people, who knew nothing about Ohio's districts, got closer and closer to finishing a map that looked like it could meet all the constitutional guidelines. Again, Allison Russo.

Allison Russo

Yes, yes. I felt hopeful, and at the moment that it became clear that they were going to come to some sort of map is when the Republicans, specifically the two legislative leaders, seemed to go on overdrive and throwing up more and more obstacles and making it more difficult.

Ira Glass

For example, asking the mapmakers to take time to add the addresses of all the incumbent office holders to the statewide district maps they were making. At a few points, the mapmakers would ask the Republican lawmakers for input on certain decisions, and they wouldn't give answers.

Matt Huffman

I can't vote yes on something when I don't know what the result of it is.

Mike DeWine

Yeah, I have really the same position. I don't think we know enough, not just on this one, frankly, but on the other ones as well. So--

Ira Glass

Republicans denied that these were delaying tactics. They say it was genuinely difficult to come up with a map that would give Democrats more seats without violating other mapmaking rules in the constitution, so finally after four long days and nights, they're at March 28 of this year, the deadline set by the court to finish the map.

And on that day, March 28th, the two sides end up in the most dramatic battle they have in these hearings. It starts in the late afternoon, when Senator Huffman addresses the committee.

Matt Huffman

I did want to talk a little bit about our timing. So the court order requires that we have this final product to the secretary of STATE today, March 28.

Ira Glass

And he explains that to do that by midnight, to get all the files prepared, et cetera, et cetera, they're going to need to vote by 10:30 that night.

Matt Huffman

And obviously, the court is serious about the deadline. I just wanted to comment, so as of 5:00, we do not have a senate map to consider. And you're nodding, Mr Johnson, so I want to make sure I got that right. As of 5:00, we cannot confirm that we have a constitutional house map, with maybe five hours or so to go in our process.

So given that, I also want to say, obviously, the court is very, very serious about getting these maps to them on time, and I'm concerned, based on the description of the process that that's going to happen. So I think we need a failsafe, and-- if we're not going to land the plane, as it's said, it would be nice to have a parachute.

Ira Glass

So Huffman proposes going back to the old map, the last unconstitutional map that the Supreme Court had rejected. His idea is the independent mapmakers try to pretty up the old map to get closer to what the Supreme Court wanted.

Matt Huffman

And that's my motion, Mr. Co-Chair.

Allison Russo

Objection.

Ira Glass

The two Democrats on the committee, Vernon Sykes and Allison Russo, respond first. Sykes, I should say, he's kind of an old school politician who usually goes out of his way to avoid saying anything bad about any of his opponents, but even he can't stop himself.

Vernon Sykes

That is ridiculous. All the time, money, and resources we've put into coming up with a constitutional map that just need edits that we can make in this time period. To distract us, the staff and the independent map draw, to divert to some other tasks, is ridiculous.

Allison Russo

Mr Co-Chair.

Vernon Sykes

Leader Russo.

Allison Russo

Thank you, Mr Co-Chair. I strongly object to this. This is so disingenuous of members of this commission to even suggest that this would be the process that we would use moving forward. The court has ordered us to create a map as a commission starting from scratch, and that is what we have done.

To totally undercut that at this point, number one, is a slap in the face to Ohio voters and completely disregarding the court order. And I will tell you that we can work as long as we need to. The court would much rather us work and finish this job than to again submit another unconstitutional map that is not drawn by the entire commission and/or submit nothing.

If we even have to go past midnight, I bet the court will be OK if we are a few hours late as long as we get this job done. Otherwise, we will be in contempt again or possibly held in contempt of not following the court's order.

Matt Huffman

Mr. Co-Chair?

Vernon Sykes

Yes.

Matt Huffman

Yep. Just a couple responses. First--

Ira Glass

Again, Senator Matt Huffman.

Matt Huffman

Your statement that these mapmakers have come up with a constitutional map-- well, I don't know that that's true, and I'm not sure how you know it's true because we never saw that. These mapmakers, doing a tremendous job in a very short period of time that was dictated by the court, have not produced a Senate map and are not able to confirm that they have provided a constitutional House map. And what I'm simply saying is we have a deadline today. It may be that Leader Russo knows what the Supreme Court is thinking, but the order says today is the day.

Ira Glass

In fact, the Supreme Court specifically said in the order, quote, "No requests or stipulations for extension of time shall be filed."

Matt Huffman

And that we have to do it by today. So that, I mean, that's simply what the order is. If somehow, some way, the mapmaker is able to produce a constitutional map that four members of the commission will support, and that is all done by 10:30, then maybe. But it doesn't appear that that's going to happen. So we have to have something that we can provide to the court today, which is what we're ordered to do.

Vernon Sykes

It seems to be no end to the arrogance of the supermajority. Any other comments?

Ira Glass

After that, the commission votes along party lines. They tell staff to make a new version of the old unconstitutional map, though they do allow the independent mapmakers to continue on their independent maps as well. After all, maybe they'll finish on time.

Vernon Sykes

The motion is approved and so ordered.

Ira Glass

That's very late afternoon, near 6 PM. Then they go into recess. When they reconvene at 9:30 that night, just an hour before the 10:30 deadline Matt Huffman tried to set for them, one of the independent mapmakers they hired, the Republican one, Doug Johnson, gives an update.

Mapmaker Doug

So co-chairs, members of the commission, as you've hopefully seen, about an hour, I guess about two hours ago now, we did finish a full house map and distributed that and have moved on to the Senate map. We're making progress as fast as humanly possible in an effort to get this done this evening.

Ira Glass

He says that he figures they'll be finished with the Senate map in 45 minutes or an hour. Then he says that they will still need to do some refinements and tweaks to the House map. Commission members have asked for some revisions that haven't been fixed yet. The House map that they made has Republican majorities in 54% of the districts, like the Supreme Court called for. And unlike the previous unconstitutional map, where all the toss-up districts, 19 of them, were Democratic-leaning, in this new map, the independent one, each party has an equal number of toss-up districts-- three Democratic, three Republican, again, like the Supreme Court called for. Matt Huffman and the Republicans are not having it. This is Bob Cupp, the Republican co-chair.

Robert Cupp

Mr. Co-Chair.

Vernon Sykes

Yes.

Robert Cupp

I think-- in spite of all of the work that's been done, and I know that the consultants came in and they worked extremely hard, I think it is not feasible to expect that we're going to have that in time to be uploaded to the secretary of state's office in compliance with the court's order. So I would just-- so what I'm going to do is to move, I guess, what has been referred to as the 328 Cupp Plan.

Ira Glass

This is the map that had been found unconstitutional with some small changes that they'd made since 6 PM.

Robert Cupp

And move that the commission adopt that plan.

Allison Russo

Objection.

Matt Huffman

Second the motion.

Allison Russo

Mr. Co-Chair.

Vernon Sykes

Leader Russo.

Ira Glass

Again, this is Democrat Allison Russo. She's been given a handout with information about this newly revised Republican map.

Allison Russo

Thank you, Mr. Co-Chair. I would just like to say that this process is and this motion and this map that's been put before us is a complete farce. I literally have been handed spreadsheets that have population deviations on them, nothing about partisan lean, nothing about symmetry. This is useless information.

Ira Glass

Bob Cupp tells her that it's a 54 to 46 map, like it had been before. But now, instead of 19 Democratic tossup districts, there were 17. Republicans still have no toss-up districts.

Allison Russo

And your assessment is that this addresses the symmetry concerns by the Supreme Court?

Ira Glass

Symmetry concerns-- that each party has a similar number of tossup districts.

Robert Cupp

This moves closer to it, and it is the best that can be done in the time that was available under the court's requirement to adopt the plan by March the 28th.

Allison Russo

OK, well, I took a lot of math in college. I would disagree with that.

[LAUGHTER]

Ira Glass

She asked if they could recess so commissioners could look at the map and if they can make suggestions to change it. Huffman says there's no time for either. Somebody points out that this was Huffman's problem with the independent mapmakers' map, that the commissioners hadn't seen it and that there wouldn't be time to make suggestions to change it. Huffman repeats, the independent map can't be done by midnight.

Allison Russo

Mr. Co-Chair, I'm going to make one more motion. I move that we, the commission, directs Eric Clark, who is the commission's attorney with the attorney general's office, to prepare an emergency motion asking the court for an extension of 12 hours.

Matt Huffman

I object. Mr. Co-Chair, we have a motion on the floor regarding-- I don't even know if Mr. Clark's available, but we've already, several times, read from the Supreme Court's decision, so--

Ira Glass

And with that, they vote on the Republican map.

Clerk

This is a motion to adopt a revised 328 Cupp map.

Audience

No! No. No! No! No! No! No!

Clerk

Governor DeWine?

Audience

Shame on you. Cheaters. Shame on you. Cheaters! Cheat!

Vernon Sykes

Quiet down, please. Please, let's have order. We still have to have order here, please.

Ira Glass

Jen Miller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters, they were the ones who sued to get the Republican maps overturned three times already, was there in the hearing room for this.

Jen Miller

Fascinatingly, this Ohio redistricting commission, that had blown through so many deadlines that were in the constitution and deadlines given to them by the Ohio Supreme Court, decides that deadlines matter and that they needed to get a map done, and they pass it along a simple majority.

Ira Glass

What was it like in the room?

Jen Miller

You know, it was interesting because we all knew that-- [LAUGHS] we knew not to be hopeful, but we were hopeful. And it was just such a letdown. Just disappointed, kind of like when you-- you've got a crush on a guy, [LAUGHS] and you think that he's finally going to do the right thing, and then he still doesn't. And you kind of, in your gut, knew that would probably happen. But you're hopeful. I cried, Ira. I cried.

Ira Glass

You cried.

Jen Miller

Yeah. Because I had done nothing. [LAUGHS] I had spent all of my time living and breathing and dreaming maps.

Ira Glass

Allison Russo told me she feels sure the Supreme Court would have granted them an extension because, for the first time, the commission was drafting a map together, in public, exactly like the court had called for. But you know, really, there's no need to speculate about this.

Maureen O'Connor

Hello?

Ira Glass

Hello. Is this Justice O'Connor?

Maureen O'Connor

Yes.

Ira Glass

Yes, this is Ira.

Maureen O'Connor

Hi, how are you?

Ira Glass

Meet Maureen O'Connor, the Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, at least through December when she retires. A lifelong Republican and the swing vote that rejected Ohio's election maps as gerrymandered seven times this past year, she knew all about the map that had been made by the independent mapmakers. I told her how the commission never submitted it because they were afraid they wouldn't make their deadline.

Maureen O'Connor

OK, that is-- what can I say? If that was their understanding, contacting the court at 9:00 at night, whatever, would have been, can we have 24 more hours? Absolutely. That would have happened. Would we have rejected something that was given to us at 9:00 in the morning? Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

Ira Glass

Here's how this played out. Some Republican allies took the case to federal court where a three-judge panel with two Trump appointees told the redistricting commission, if you can't come to an agreement on a map that's constitutional, well, you just use the Republicans' unconstitutional gerrymandered map. After that, unsurprisingly, the commission didn't even try to come to an agreement on a map, never even held a meeting with that purpose. That's why Ohio is going to the polls this week on the gerrymandered maps.

I got interested in all this, wondering how lawmakers could defy their own constitution over and over. I'm talking about Huffman, the person who drove this process more than anybody else. Here's what I learned. In his telling, Republicans were not defying the Supreme Court. He says they tried to comply, and the court kept telling them no. He thinks the court's rulings misread the constitution.

The way Matt Huffman reads this part of the constitution, which, of course, he had a big hand in writing, he believes that if you follow all the kind of mechanical rules for how to draw maps, keeping districts compact, not dividing counties too many times, that kind of thing, then you actually can ignore the part of the rules that are about proportional fairness, the rules that dictate how many districts go to each party.

Matt Huffman

This section about proportional voting is not required. It's aspirational only.

Ira Glass

Of course, the Supreme Court of Ohio sees that very differently. But there is wording in there that Huffman can point to. One of the things that Chief Justice O'Connor told me was that she thought that most Ohioans don't understand what kind of flawed, leaky boat this constitutional amendment is.

And I think Huffman really believed from the start that when they wrote this language, he'd created rules that would allow him to get his map through, that would let him get any map through with any mix of Democratic and Republican districts because he believes, again, that the language in the constitution says that if you follow all the other rules in drawing districts, it doesn't matter how many districts each party gets.

In fact, we know from court documents that he instructed the Republican mapmakers to get everything else about the maps correct. Be sure to follow all those other rules, and don't worry about how many districts you give to the Democrats. But beyond that, in a bigger way, Huffman told me he thinks that there are real limits to what courts can tell legislators to do, just in general.

And not long after Huffman and I talked, Republicans in Ohio took one of their redistricting cases to the US Supreme Court. Basically, it's like a North Carolina case you may have heard of that the court is going to hear this year, where one side is arguing that the state supreme courts have no power at all over any state legislatures. Fifty state chief justices, Republicans and Democrats, filed a brief with the Supreme Court arguing against that point of view.

OK, so what happens next? Well, even while they're arguing that state supreme court justices should have less power, Republicans in Ohio right now are fighting to get different justices onto the state supreme court, justices who might agree with Matt Huffman's arguments and approve Republican maps that the current court rejects as unconstitutional. Three seats on the court are open.

Every time the court rejected the Republican maps, it was by the narrowest margin, a four to three vote. The two parties have spent over $10 million on these Supreme Court races so far, the Republicans outspending the Democrats nearly two to one. The campaigns are unashamedly partisan. Here's one of the Republican supreme court candidates speaking at an event at a boathouse about the three judicial candidates.

Patrick Fischer

If you vote for three and all three win, we take back conservative control of the court, if that's important to you.

[APPLAUSE]

And just for myself, don't forget, that's Fischer with a C for the constitution and common sense. Thanks.

Ira Glass

If electing justices who will side with Matt Huffman's reading of the constitution is the Republican hope right now, the Democrats and good government groups have drawn other conclusions from their exhausting year-long slog at the redistricting commission. Here's Jen Miller of the League of Women Voters.

Jen Miller

The lesson is that politicians are going to be politicians, and we have to take them out of the equation completely.

Ira Glass

How?

Jen Miller

I don't-- we're going to have to have another ballot initiative. It's going to be hard. It's going to be expensive. It's going to take a long time. But if you look around the states and see which places redistricting went well, they were independent, balanced commissions.

Ira Glass

Independent in this case means it's not politicians or public officials drawing the maps.

If you want to imagine another way that things could've gone in Ohio this year, you can just look at New York State. In New York, it was the Democrats who run the state who drew a heavily gerrymandered map. They gave themselves majorities in 22 of the state's 26 congressional districts that determine who goes to the US House of Representatives. This year New York, like Ohio, had a brand new constitutional amendment to stop gerrymandering. And this year, the New York State Supreme Court struck down the Democrat's gerrymandered map as illegal, unconstitutional.

A special master appointed by the court redrew the map. The number of safe Democratic districts dropped from 22 to just 15. And the Democrats stopped fighting. They accepted the court's ruling. That's the map the state will go to the polls with this week. It'll be that much harder, seven seats harder, for Democrats to keep their control of the US House of Representatives with this un-gerrymandered map.

And why did the Democrats in New York accept the court's ruling? Well for starters, it would've been a lot harder for the Democrats to keep fighting for their illegal map because New York's constitution lets the Supreme Court appoint a special master who works for the court to draw a new map, and then the court can impose that new map on the entire state.

Ohio's constitution doesn't have anything like that. In fact, the wording in the constitution specifically prohibits it, thanks to Matt Huffman and the Republicans. If a map is bad, if it gerrymanders, the constitution throws the job of redrawing back to politicians on the redistricting commission, who can basically stonewall. And so Republicans in Ohio never redrew their map to give the court what it asked for.

And they hope they'll never have to, when they get a new set of justices on the court this next year.

[MUSIC - "I'LL DO IT ANYWAY" BY THE LEMONHEADS]

Our program was produced today by Zoe Chace and Valerie Kipnis. People who put together today's show include Elna Baker, Chris Benderev, Sean Cole, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Charlotte Sleeper, Lilly Sullivan, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Matt Tierney, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman, and our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

I first learned about the redistricting fight in Ohio reading Jane Mayer's article in the New Yorker not long ago about the Republican supermajority there, how it passes laws that are much more red than Ohio's population, which I recommend.

A special thanks today to David Niven and Dan Tokaji, who both helped with map analysis, and to Eric French and Leticia Wiggins from WOSU, who recorded most of these interviews.

Also thanks to Robert Cupp, John Fortney, Aaron Mulvey, Dennis Kucinich, Freda Levenson, Yurij Rudensky, Michael McDonald, Ann Henkener, Keary McCarthy, Karen Kasler, Andy Chow, Chris Welter, Ilya Maritz, Mallory Golski, Maya Majikas, Myla Danison, Jeff Rusnak, Chris Davey, Bishop Lord, and of course, Sheldon Harnick.

Our website, ThisAmericanLife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 750 episodes for absolutely free. Also merch for your holiday shopping-- is it too soon to say that? I just said it. Again, ThisAmericanLife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, or as he calls himself, Torey C. Malatia.

Patrick Fischer

With a C for the constitution and common sense.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of "This American Life."

[MUSIC - "I'LL DO IT ANYWAY" BY THE LEMONHEADS]