COLUMBUS — A plan to change how Ohio draws its legislative and congressional boundaries has collected enough signatures to go before voters and might be the only citizen-driven issue on the November ballot.

Voters First officials submitted 450,533 signatures to Secretary of State Jon Husted’s office Tuesday.

The secretary of state has 20 days to verify the signatures as belonging to registered Ohio voters. The proposed constitutional amendment would create a citizen board composed of registered voters unaffiliated with parties or politicians to evaluate and draw boundaries in public meetings.

Any Ohio citizen who voted in two of the last three elections could apply for a spot on the 12-member Ohio Independent Redistricting Commission.

Elected and party officials, lobbyists and major donors would not be allowed to join.

A group of Ohio appeals court judges and political parties would narrow the pool from which nine members would be randomly chosen. The selected members would then choose the final three members.

The commission would consider competitiveness and past voting patterns and also accept ideas from the public. All meetings and records would be made public.

The commission’s first decision would be implemented in 2014 and would change the current boundaries set after the 2010 Census.

Voters First was the only organization of six collecting signatures for the November 2012 ballot to contact the secretary of state’s office with plans to deliver signatures, an office spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Supporters of other petitions circulating the state admitted they fell short of the necessary 385,253 signatures.

Voters First chairwoman Catherine Turcer said volunteers will continue to collect signatures in case some are invalidated.

The League of Women Voters of Ohio and other nonpartisan groups formed Voters First in response to new boundaries drafted by the GOP-controlled Apportionment Board and the General Assembly last year. The league and Democrats said the boundaries were made to benefit incumbents.

“They choose their voters including where their donors live,” Ann Henkener of the League of Women Voters of Ohio said Tuesday. “[Boundaries] are manipulated for the politicians and it doesn’t have anything to do with the voters.”

The effort has been criticized by Republican elected officials who say the process is unnecessary and complaints about the system can be addressed through a bipartisan panel of lawmakers. Cincinnati-area Republican Rep. Lou Blessing, in a recent letter to House leadership, called the proposal “a sham and a charade” that could never be totally independent.

Turcer did not disclose all the groups involved in the effort, but labor unions, the NAACP and the Libertarian Party of Ohio are some of the organizations that have thrown their support behind the effort. We Are Ohio, which raised more than $42 million to defeat Senate Bill 5 last year, also joined the cause.

Also on the ballot

Ohio voters will be asked in November 2012, as they are every 20 years, if the state should hold a convention to revise the Ohio constitution.

Maybe next year

Several groups have already begun collecting signatures for 2013 for different causes: a right to work law, legalizing same-sex marriage and money for a Delaware state company to create renewable energy jobs.

Out of the running

• The legislature failed to act on legislation prohibiting dog auctions and supporters ran out of money to gather enough signatures to put it on the ballot.

• The two medical marijuana bills also failed to collect enough signatures. Tonya Davis, who led the Ohio Alternative Treatment Amendment effort, said she was encouraged by the thousands of signatures collected and she will continue lobbying state lawmakers to consider a bill to legalize medicinal marijuana.

• An anti-abortion group in Ohio fell short Tuesday in its attempt to gather enough signatures to change the state constitution to declare that life begins when a human egg is fertilized. The group had collected about 30,000 of the roughly 385,000 signatures required for November ballots, Patrick Johnston, the director of Personhood Ohio, said Tuesday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.