A federal judge has dismissed Republican Attorney General Dave Yost鈥檚 lawsuit against the Biden administration to force the results of last year鈥檚 Census to be released by the end of this month. Ohio had hoped to start drawing new legislative and Congressional maps soon, for the first time under a process approved by voters.
But the legal battle isn鈥檛 over.
Congressional maps are redrawn after a census, and the Census Bureau said its data . Yost sued to return to the March 31 legal deadline.
But Southern District of Ohio Judge Thomas Rose writes that there won鈥檛 be a decision on whether Ohio will have 16 or 15 representatives in Congress till later in the year.
Rose notes that the Ohio constitution has other ways to draw maps without census data, and that the state not having a flexible map-drawing schedule because of the pandemic is not the administration鈥檚 problem. And finally, he writes that the state鈥檚 frustration in not having the data isn鈥檛 concrete harm, so Ohio doesn鈥檛 have standing to sue.
The Attorney General鈥檚 office has appealed the ruling.
