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Many voters heard about Robert F. Kennedy Jr suspending his 2024 presidential campaign. Many voters heard about the drama over "hot mics" in presidential debates.
But how many voters know that Utah lawmakers held an emergency legislative session last Wednesday just so they could undermine the will of state voters?
Or, that Ohio lawmakers are trying to deceive voters in order to codify partisan gerrymandering? It's almost as if they took advantage of the distractions.
Utah Lawmakers Don't Like Voters Taking Policy into Their Own Hands
The Utah Legislature advanced a constitutional amendment to the November ballot that if passed will give its members the authority to rewrite or outright repeal any citizen-led ballot initiative approved by voters.
This amendment would also apply to ballot measures approved in previous elections. The first target? Likely Proposition 4 from 2018, which created an independent advisory commission on redistricting.
Summed up, voters created a 7-member independent redistricting commission that makes recommendations for new electoral maps every decade, but ultimately it is still up to the legislature to approve the maps.
The state legislature tried to weaken Proposition 4 with SB 200 in 2020, which removed the initiative's requirement that lawmakers explain their decision-making on maps and its prohibition on partisan gerrymandering.
Lawmakers also created their own redistricting commission.
In other words, they repealed and replaced Proposition 4. However, on July 11, 2024, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously ruled that SB 200 was unconstitutional under state law:
"The people’s right to alter or reform the government through an initiative is constitutionally protected from government infringement, including legislative amendment, repeal, or replacement of the initiative in a manner that impairs the reform enacted by the people."
The justices sent the case back to a lower court to determine the proper redistricting process for the state's congressional districts, all of which heavily favor the Republican Party.
Lawmakers cited the court's decision as the reason they pushed their constitutional amendment to strip voters of their power to enact government and voting reform.
While it seems like this amendment would be dead-on-arrival before voters, lawmakers attached incentives to support it -- incentives that have colloquially been called "ballot candy."
Like banning foreign entities from spending money in favor of or opposition to state ballot measures.
Ohio Lawmakers Seek to Codify Gerrymandering by Confusing Voters
The Ohio secretary of state certified 535,000 of the more than 731,000 signatures collected in support of a Citizens Not Politicians ballot initiative aimed at ending partisan gerrymandering.
If passed the initiative would replace the Ohio Redistricting Commission, which is composed entirely of elected officials, with an independent redistricting process.
It establishes a 15-member citizen redistricting commission of Republicans, Democrats, and independents who do not hold (or have held) elected office. Political party officials and lobbyists would be barred as well.
And the initiative explicitly prohibits partisan gerrymandering by stating that maps drawn cannot give an unfair advantage to a political party or its members.
However, ballot language approved by state officials say the 15-member commission would be “required to gerrymander” Ohio's electoral districts -- language designed to confuse voters.
AP reported on a lawsuit filed by the initiative's campaign to get the ballot language corrected:
"In its lawsuit, Citizens Not Politicians said the approved ballot language 'gets it entirely backward,' since their proposal bans partisan manipulation of the maps. 'It does so by ensuring that the plans adopted by the Commission seek to approximate the statewide partisan preferences of Ohioans while drawing geographically contiguous districts that reflect communities of interest,' the lawsuit says.
Republican state Sen. Theresa Gavarone argues the language meets the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word "gerrymander." However, the OED definition explicitly defines it as a manipulative practice to gain an unfair advantage