After more than a year of deliberations finally resulted in the unanimous passage of new Ohio General Assembly District maps in late September, the ACLU of Ohio says it has initiated a new court challenge of the maps.

The ACLU of Ohio is joined by the national American Civil Liberties Union and Covington & Burling LLC in the case, which alleges the maps, "like all the predecessor plans rejected by the court, are still an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander," the ACLU said in a release.

The lawsuit is filed on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, and a group of individual Ohio voters.

The maps passed unanimously by the Ohio Redistricting Commission in late September were the 6th set of maps put forward by the commission after the first 5 failed to stand up to scrutiny in the Ohio Supreme Court. 

The new brief cites Section 6 of Article 11 (XI) of the Ohio Constitution, as have previous cases against redrawn maps, which reads as follows:

"The Ohio redistricting commission shall attempt to draw a general assembly district plan that meets all of the following standards:

(A) No general assembly district plan shall be drawn primarily to favor or disfavor a political party.

(B) The statewide proportion of districts whose voters, based on statewide state and federal partisan general election results during the last ten years, favor each political party shall correspond closely to the statewide preferences of the voters of Ohio.

(C) General assembly districts shall be compact."

In practice, Section 6 holds that Ohio's General Assembly Maps should adhere to what the Ohio Supreme Court calls the "proportionality standard," meaning that maps for Ohio's state House and Senate should produce representative bodies that 'correspond closely' to the overall preference of Ohio voters. 

In rulings against previous maps, the Ohio Supreme Court has held that the word "attempt" in the opening line of Article XI does not constitute that adherence to the article is optional.

"The qualifying word 'attempt' does not mean that the Section 6(B) standard is merely aspirational," the court wrote in its February 2022 ruling against a different set of maps. 

To those ends, the new case says that the new maps do not proportionally represent the state, and as such violate the Ohio State Constitution.

Previous 21 News analysis showed that the new maps would create a State House that is 62% GOP and a State Senate that is 70% Republican.

In 2022, Republicans earned 58.8% of the vote in State House races. In the State Senate election, the GOP received 57.4% of the vote.

"We call on the Supreme Court of Ohio to reject these maps, because they violate the Ohio Constitution and the right of voters to have fair representation in the Ohio legislature," said Jen Miller, Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio.

“These General Assembly maps are so clearly in violation of the Ohio Constitution, that they simply cannot go unchallenged,” said Freda Levenson, legal director for the ACLU of Ohio. “The fact that the commission enacted this gerrymandered plan, in total disregard of the voters, is one more illustration that the process is broken."