Ohio Democrats, who are favored to win a referendum this Tuesday to repeal Gov. John Kasich’s law eliminating collective bargaining for public employees, have rolled out another petition drive in an ongoing fight: Congressional redistricting.
On Tuesday, the Ohio Dems announced that petitions will be circulated during the campaigning on election day next week, targeting the redistricting map signed in September for Ohio’s new 16-member delegation, which would produce 12 solid Republican seats to 4 solid Democratic seats. (The current line-up, after the 2010 Republican wave, is 13 Republicans to 5 Democrats, out of 18 seats.)
But this threat of a referendum does have an escape clause. Dems could call off a referendum — if Republicans negotiate a new map. And thus far, the Columbus Dispatch reports that Republicans are poised to try holding a vote on a new map on Thursday, though they are still without an actual deal with the Dems.
So why would Republicans want to play ball here?
As TPM has previously posted, a potential referendum, if triggered, would be held November 2012 — the same time that the state’s voters are scheduled to actually vote for their members of Congress. And if a referendum happens, then the same redistricting law would itself be placed on hold, pending the result.
The, the state could find itself at a legal impasse, perhaps requiring some sort of judicial intervention in order to move forward with the constitutionally required 2012 House elections.
Furthermore, the state cannot simply move forward with the previous map, because the state has lost two House districts in the 2010 census, going from 18 seats down to 16.
Under Ohio law, triggering a repeal referendum requires organizers to collect signatures equal to just six percent of the total votes in the last gubernatorial election, with additional requirements that they be sufficiently spread out with at least three percent of the gubernatorial vote across at least half the counties in the state. (Dems met this threshold a few times over for the referendum on public-employee unions, collecting several times as many the required signatures.)
