An Ohio man says he’s finished with Republicans after the state GOP intentionally manipulated voters into rejecting a ballot measure that would have helped stop gerrymandering.

Michael Lederman wrote in The Columbus Dispatch that he has lived in Ohio for 50 years and that, “sometimes the Republican Party has the better candidate on the ballot, and so I’ve voted for Republicans in the past.”

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“This is nasty.”

But he said in Ohio, he doesn’t think he ever will again after GOP chairman Alex Triantafilou admitted during a speech that “confusing Ohioans was not such a bad strategy.”

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Lederman explained that Triantafilou was referring to “the Ohio Republican secretary of state’s bizarre wording of Ohio Issue 1 in last November’s election.”

“I don’t know anybody who understood it,” he continued, “and that apparently was the intent.”

He said that “the goal of Ohio Issue 1 was to install a bipartisan commission whose job it would be to make sure that Ohio electoral districts were drawn fairly such that each voter in Ohio had a fair chance of being heard” (Ohio has been given the worst possible ranking by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project).

Despite that goal, the ballot stated that the amendment would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering” and establish a taxpayer-funded commission that would be “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor either of the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio.”

“They knew that when voters are confused by an amendment, they often vote no,” Lederman said. “Already, these shenanigans are being called ‘A Case Study in Ballot Manipulation.‘ And this has consequences.”

The case study was presented by the Kettering Foundation, which said the language on the ballot was “clearly in the service of a Republican status quo,” which is why “the GOP-controlled state supreme court didn’t seem to mind.”

He explained that Ohio politics has long been steeped in Republican-backed corruption.

“If you want your vote to be heard,” he concluded, “and you want to know what you’re voting for in the state of Ohio, think hard before you elect a Republican as secretary of state.”

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