Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton said Monday she plans to help try again to pass a redistricting reform amendment in 2027.
Acton called the amendment that voters defeated in the November 2024 election a “very reasonable attempt” to change redistricting, the process of drawing state legislative and congressional district maps. She said the “lawless” way state Republicans wrote the ballot language describing the amendment “intentionally confused” Ohioans who otherwise would have supported it.
The measure failed 54% to 46%.
“I think a lot of public officials on both sides of the aisle would love that. They’d love to not have money come from out of state and getting primaried to extremes… So I think there’s the will in Ohio, and we need leadership to get it done, and I think that will be a really important part of us getting good people again,” Acton said.
Acton brought up her interest in reviving the redistricting amendment during a campaign appearance on Monday. Democrats widely believe voters were confused in 2024 by the Republican-authored ballot language, which described it as creating a panel “required to gerrymander” state districts, and have been campaigning on the issue this year.
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Republicans say the defeat reflects the will of Ohio voters, and that their language helped them accurately understand the amendment’s effects. President Donald Trump opposed the proposal as a Democratic power grab before going on to win Ohio by 11 percentage points.
The amendment would have replaced the Ohio Redistricting Commission, a panel of elected officials, with a new panel on which elected officials would be banned from serving. The measure’s backers described it as a way to prevent gerrymandering, or manipulating political maps to benefit the party drawing the lines, although Democrats supported it specifically as a way to reduce majority Republicans’ power in the state.
Getting another amendment on the ballot would require backers to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures, which typically involves spending millions of dollars to hire a professional petitioning firm.
Acton is likely to face Republican Vivek Ramaswamy in the November election, although Ramaswamy first would have to defeat Casey Putsch in the May 5 primary election.
