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Ohio has a bicameral legislature, with 33 Senate members and 99 House members. Beginning with the 2002 General Election, each new Senate district had a population of about 342,000 people, up from 330,000 from the districts crafted in 1990. Each Senate district is comprised of three new House Districts, each of which has a population of about 114,000, up from about 110,000 from ten years ago. The five-member Ohio Apportionment Board convenes every ten years to fulfill an Ohio Constitutional mandate that the Senate and House district boundaries be changed to reflect the growth (or decline) in the state's population as well as population shifts within the state over the previous ten-year period. The Board's duty is to maintain districts of roughly equal populations and make each one as compact as possible. The Apportionment Board met on October 1, 2001 and adopted a new apportionment plan but reconvened on October 4, 2001 to make technical adjustments in the legal description of the House districts. A legal challenge to the plan was mounted by Democratic Party interests, but a three-member federal court panel dismissed the challenge, a decision that was not appealed (See Ohio Report No. 100, May 23, 2003). You may read the relevant language of the Ohio Constitution for details on the Apportionment Board's composition and duties.
Every tens year following the national census, the Ohio legislature is charged with redrawing the geographic boundaries of each of the state's U.S. House of Representatives districts to reflect a gain or loss of population as well as population shifts within the state and the nation. The 2000 national census confirmed what many Ohio officials anticipated - the state would lose one of its 19 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. In November 2002, Ohioans elected 18 members of Congress, reflecting a net loss of six seats Ohio since 1971. There are two major ramifications of a state losing seats in the U.S. House: one is the obvious loss of influence in Washington, D.C., while the other is a reduction from 21 to 20 the number of Ohio's electoral votes by which the President of the United States is elected.
Under the plan adopted by the Ohio General Assembly, two incumbent Democrats - U.S. Reps. Thomas Sawyer of Akron and James Traficant of Youngstown - were placed into a single district, the 17th that roughly stretches across northeastern Ohio from Summit to Mahoning counties. Each of the 18 new districts will have a population of 630,730 people.
Unlike members of the Ohio House and Senate and its state elected officials, Ohio's U.S. House members aren't subject to term limits even though Ohioans voted in overwhelming numbers in 1992 to impose them. That voter decision made in a number of states including Ohio was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1995 ruling which held, on a 5-4 vote, that the authority to impose such term limits rests exclusively with Congress.
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