Official announces run for state rep

CELINA - Mercer County Recorder Angie King on Wednesday afternoon announced she intends to run in the Republican primary election for the 82nd District that had been reshaped to consist of Mercer, Van Wert and Paulding counties and some of Defiance County.

However, those plans were thrown into uncertainty after the Ohio Supreme Court Wednesday declared GOP-drawn legislative maps invalid, agreeing with voting rights advocates that the lines were unconstitutionally gerrymandered.

King, res-ponding to the news, said she plans to soldier ahead until the matter is resolved.  

"I'm staying the course and will continue to campaign until I know how it impacts the 82nd District," she said Wednesday.

King served on Celina City Council for 11 years and has been the county recorder for nine years.

"The last couple of years, like many Americans, I have had concerns with the way some in government have pushed actions that minimize our freedoms and liberties," she said in a news release. "As a conservative Republican, I am pro-life, pro-Second Amendment and pro-freedom. I will defend and support sound public policy that protects our freedoms and helps to ensure our children and grandchildren have a bright future."

The 82nd Ohio House district is currently made up of Defiance, Paulding and Van Wert counties, as well as part of Auglaize County, and is represented by Craig Riedel, R-Defiance. Riedel, who is in his third term, earlier this week on social media revealed he is running for U.S. Congress.

The district, though, had been redrawn to include Mercer County as part of a new legislative maps that were challenged and ultimately rejected Wednesday by the Ohio Supreme Court.

In a 4-3 ruling, the court sent the maps back to the Ohio Redistricting Commission to take another crack at complying with provisions of a 2015 constitutional amendment requires there be an attempt at avoiding partisan favoritism. Justices gave the panel 10 days and retained jurisdiction to review their handiwork.

The dispute comes amid the process of redrawing legislative and congressional district maps that states must undertake once every 10 years to reflect population changes in the U.S. Census.

This was the powerful Redistricting Commission's first time drawing new legislative maps of 99 Ohio House and 33 Ohio Senate districts. Its members - five Republicans and two Democrats - failed to arrive at bipartisan consensus, so the map they approved Sept. 16 along party lines was set to last only four years, rather than 10 years.

The panel's two Democrats, Sen. Vernon Sykes and Rep. Emilia Sykes, his daughter, said the ruling confirmed Democrats' contention that the lines were "unfair, unrepresentative and unconstitutional."

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, a member of the commission and whose son was among Wednesday's dissenting justices, pledged in a statement to "work with my fellow Redistricting Commission members on revised maps that are consistent with the court's order."

Writing for the majority, Justice Melody Stewart, a Democrat, said the maps favored one party and didn't meet the amendment's standard that the districts must be proportionally distributed to reflect Ohio's 54% Republican, 46% Democratic voter mix.

Moderate Republican Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, who at 70 years old must leave the court Dec. 31 due to age limits, provided a pivotal swing vote, joining the court's three Democrats in a victory for national voting-rights and Democratic groups.

Republicans who controlled the map-drawing process had argued the commission met its constitutional mandates by complying with a host of other protocols, which made the partisan favoritism and proportionality provisions moot.

In their dissents, the court's three remaining Republicans argued that the majority was grasping at a "sweeping power of judicial review" not available to the court under the provisions of the 2015 constitutional amendment.

"The text of the Ohio Constitution is clear, and given the allegations in the complaints, this court lacks the authority to act as requested by the petitioners bringing these cases," Justice Patrick Fischer wrote.

The decision impacts three separate lawsuits against the maps brought on behalf of Ohio voters by a host of national groups, including the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, the ACLU, the League of Women Voters, CAIR-Ohio and the Ohio Organizing Collaborative.

Freda Levenson, legal director for the ACLU of Ohio, said the decision sent a clear message to lawmakers that they can't "put politics over people."

"The Ohio Supreme Court's decision is huge," she said in a statement. "It not only orders the immediate drawing of a new, constitutional map, but it also validates that Ohio's voter-enacted constitutional prohibition that partisan gerrymandering is not merely 'aspirational' - it has real teeth. This bodes well for the 2022 election cycle - and beyond."

- The Associated Press contributed to this story.