The Oregon Supreme Court on Friday ruled that a proposed ballot title for an initiative to change the way the state redraws political districts was insufficient and sent it back to Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum for a rewrite.

That procedural delay will likely mean proponents won’t have enough time once the ballot language is final to gather the signatures needed to get it on the ballot by the early July deadline.

The proposed initiative would take the once-a-decade job of redrawing the state’s legislative and congressional districts away from Oregon lawmakers and hand the job to a new independent commission. Supporters say state lawmakers face a conflict of interest when they get to redraw their own districts. Out of the 90 new state House and Senate districts that lawmakers drew in the fall, only a couple failed to protect incumbents and one of those was Rep. Marty Wilde, a Eugene Democrat who fell out of favor with his caucus after criticizing his own district as gerrymandered.

The Supreme Court said Rosenblum failed to adequately call out for voters another effect of the proposal: It would scrap lawmakers’ approved legislative and congressional districts and have the new independent commission draw new ones in 2023.

In its unanimous ruling, the court sided with arguments by the political nonprofit Our Oregon, which pools the resources of the state’s public employee unions, the AFL-CIO and other interest groups that tend to support Democrats, including Planned Parenthood and the Oregon League of Conservation Voters. The court ordered that Rosenblum must rewrite the ballot caption and summary to more clearly explain that the proposed initiative would result in the new commission drawing new maps, to replace those drawn and passed by lawmakers in 2021. Although Our Oregon had urged the court to rule that Rosenblum must make room in the 15-word caption by removing an explanation of the commission’s equal numbers of Democrats, Republicans and other members, the justices ruled that Rosenblum could find a way to include both effects.

As for the ballot summary, the court ruled that “the seven-word statement that the attorney general has used to describe the effect—’Repeals 2021 maps; requires redistricting in 2023′— is cryptic in a way that might be necessary in a caption or result statement, where far fewer words are permitted, but is unacceptable in a summary, where the 125-word limit provides a greater opportunity to explain the measure’s most important effects. Moreover, the placement of the statement at the very end of the summary, where less important aspects of a measure are often listed in similarly compressed form separated by semicolons, could be viewed as signaling that it, too, addresses a comparatively unimportant effect.”

The ruling is a setback for supporters of the redistricting commission, including the former president of the League of Women Voters of Oregon Norman Turrill, who is chief petitioner for the initiative, and good government groups, business associations and the Independent and Progressive parties. With just over two months until the July 8 deadline to turn in signatures to get on the ballot, they still have not received the green light to begin gathering the 149,360 signatures necessary.

Todd Sprague, a spokesperson for the Oregon Judicial Department, said in an email that it is not abnormal that the court took four months to decide the ballot title challenge, which was filed on Jan. 6. These challenges take at least one to two months to resolve and “when modifications and general challenges are involved, the minimum time to judgment is nearly three months,” Sprague wrote. He said the court’s consideration of two other elections cases — the residency of Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Nick Kristof and Democratic Secretary of State Shemia Fagan’s rejection of three proposed initiatives to place limits on campaign contributions — kept the court busy during this time. Records show the court required both sides to submit final briefs in the redistricting case by Feb. 1.

This is the second attempt by supporters to get the independent redistricting commission, an idea championed by Democrats in states controlled by Republicans, onto the Oregon ballot. In 2020, the campaign’s signature gathering efforts were hampered by the pandemic. But after a federal judge lowered the number of signatures needed to get it on the ballot, Rosenblum appealed the ruling, with Gov. Kate Brown’s support.

The Oregonian analysis of district maps crafted by the Legislature in fall 2020 found that a small percentage of the new districts would likely be competitive. Districts in which one party is almost sure to win can reduce the incentive for representatives to be responsive to their constituents’ interests.