While the effort just kicked off and has a long way to get certified, there’s an effort to get a constitutional amendment on the 2024 general election ballot to again change state and federal legislative redistricting.

Citizens Not Politicians, a group spearheading the effort, collected about 7,300 signatures from 31 counties in about four days.

The group needs at least 1,000 to be valid to start the process. Also, Attorney General Dave Yost will decide next week if the lengthy summary of the proposed ballot issue is a truthful statement of what is being proposed.

After that, the Ohio Ballot Board has 10 days to determine if it contains only one constitutional amendment. Once certified, the attorney general must file a verified copy of it and the summary with the secretary of state and then the process of collecting signatures can start.

The group would need at least 413,487 valid signatures on petitions by July 3, 2024, to get on the Nov. 5, 2024, ballot.

The group’s two public faces are retired Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, and former court Justice Yvette McGee Brown, a Democrat. The two became close when they briefly served together on the court.

O’Connor sided with the three current Democratic justices on the Supreme Court seven times in rejecting state and federal legislative maps for being unconstitutional because they unfairly favored Republicans.

The final congressional map court decision came after the May 2022 primary so those districts were kept in place for last year’s election.

The final state legislative maps were permitted to be used last year by a federal panel.

Both have to be redrawn in the coming months for next year’s election. With O’Connor forced to leave the bench because of the state’s age limit on judges and replaced by Republican Joe Deters, the maps drawn by Ohio Republicans almost certainly will be approved by the court and would be in effect for four years if Democrats oppose them.

Constitutional amendments approved by voters in 2015 for state legislative maps and in 2018 for congressional districts spell out reforms on how they are drawn.

The Ohio Redistricting Commission is in charge of state House and Senate maps and the state Legislature gets first crack at a congressional map. If that fails, it goes to the commission. The commission and Legislature are dominated by Republicans, but it gives Democrats the ability to limit new maps to four years rather than 10.

If this constitutional amendment proposal is approved, a 15-member Ohio Citizens Restricting Commission — equally made up of Republicans, Democrats and independents from different geographic and demographic parts of the state — would draw “fair and impartial districts by making it unconstitutional to draw voting districts that discriminate against or favor any political party or individual politician,” according to the group.

Current and former politicians, political party officials and lobbyists would be banned from serving.

The proposal contains 39 provisions.

The commission would first draw new districts in 2025 for the 2026 election and then following each federal census, the next one scheduled for 2030.

Statehouse Republicans oppose the plan saying independent citizen commissions are not really independent.

Ohio House Majority Floor Leader Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, tweeted: “You are more likely to see pink unicorns and pots of gold at rainbow’s end than you are to see an ‘independent commission.’ Who picks them and who advised them re-injects politics into a political exercise.”

O’Connor said: “Ohio is one of the country’s most gerrymandered states and even today is operating under maps deemed unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court. This proposal would end gerrymandering by empowering citizens, not politicians, to draw fair districts using an open and independent process.”

Like all citizen-backed constitutional amendments, it takes a considerable amount of work to get this certified to the ballot.

It would have been significantly more difficult had Issue 1 passed during the Aug. 8 special election. That failed ballot proposal would have required valid signatures from at least 5 percent of those who voted in the last gubernatorial election in all of the state’s 88 counties to qualify for the ballot. The current law is a 44-county minimum.

It also would have raised the threshold to pass amendments from a simple majority to 60 percent.