[Ohio will be voting on a measure that makes it harder to amend
the constitution in a high-stakes election – and the Republican
proposal is ‘minority rule’, experts say.]
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THE ELECTION THAT COULD DETERMINE THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY IN OHIO  
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Sam Levine
August 6, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Ohio will be voting on a measure that makes it harder to amend the
constitution in a high-stakes election – and the Republican proposal
is ‘minority rule’, experts say. _

Supporters and opponents of the GOP-backed measure pack the
statehouse rotunda in Columbus on 10 May., Samantha Hendrickson/AP

 

An under-the-radar election in Ohio
[[link removed]] on Tuesday has quietly
emerged as one of the most high-stakes stress tests for American
democracy in recent years.

The question Ohio voters will decide on 8 August is simple: how easy
should it be to amend the state constitution? Like 17
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[[link removed]]other
states [[link removed]],
Ohio allows citizens to place constitutional amendments on the
statewide ballot if they get a certain number of signatures and more
than 50% of the statewide vote. The process has been in place for more
than a century in Ohio, and in November, voters will use it to decide
whether to protect abortion rights.

In May, Republicans who control the state legislature abruptly sent a
proposal
[[link removed]] to
the ballot called Issue 1 that would make it much harder to change the
constitution. If approved, a constitutional amendment would need 60%
of the vote to pass instead of a simple majority. It would also make
it significantly harder for citizens to even propose a constitutional
amendment, requiring signatures from 5% of the voters in all of
Ohio’s 88 counties (the state currently requires organizers to get
signatures in 44).

“It absolutely is minority rule,” Maureen O’Connor
[[link removed]],
a Republican who served on the Ohio supreme court for nearly two
decades and stepped down as chief justice at the end of last year, and
opposes Issue 1, said in a telephone interview. “If you get 59.9% of
a vote that says yes, 40.1% can say no. This is the way it’s gonna
be. We can thwart the effort of the majority of Ohioans that vote. And
that’s not American.”

The change in signature gathering would make it nearly impossible to
get something on the ballot, which is already difficult, and only
allow deep-pocketed groups to do so, said Jen Miller, the president of
the Ohio chapter of the League of Women Voters, which opposes the
amendment.

The campaign to raise the threshold has been largely funded
by Richard Uihlein
[[link removed]],
an Illinois billionaire and GOP mega-donor who has spent more than
$5m
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the effort so far. A conservative non-profit backed by Uihlein, the
Foundation for Government Accountability, has been involved
[[link removed]] in
efforts to raise the threshold for constitutional amendments across
the country.

We can thwart the effort of the majority of Ohioans that vote. And
that’s not American

Maureen O’Connor

Republicans have made little secret
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why they’re in a rush
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change the rules: this fall, Ohioans are set to vote on an amendment
that would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s
constitution. “This is 100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion
amendment out of our constitution. The left wants to jam it in there
this coming November,” the Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, a
Republican
[[link removed]] running
for the US Senate and one of the most prominent supporters of the
amendment, said last month.

Similar measures to protect abortion access have been extremely
popular in other states and passed by wide margins after the supreme
court overturned Roe v Wade last year.

Beyond reproductive rights, the August election has far-reaching
implications for democracy in Ohio. Republicans hold a supermajority
in the Ohio legislature after they manipulated district lines to their
advantage last year, brazenly ignoring several rebukes from the state
supreme court. Activists are already working to draft a constitutional
amendment that would strip lawmakers of their redistricting authority
entirely. But making it harder to change the constitution would
essentially allow Republicans to keep their distorted advantage.

“Ohioans would no longer have a tool accessible to them to keep the
Ohio government accountable when they are not acting in the interest
of our communities and our families,” said Jen Miller, the president
of the Ohio chapter of the League of Women Voters, which opposes Issue
1.

“What we’re talking about is that a small minority would be able
to block the will of the majority of Ohioans.”

‘A very dirty trick’

Opponents of Issue 1 have assembled a wide-ranging coalition that
includes civic action groups, unions, and environmental groups. The
campaign, One Person One Vote, has received considerable funding from
out-of-state progressive groups, and have aggressively canvassed
across the state, sent mailings to voters, and held weekly community
meetings throughout the summer.

One hot evening in July, Sarah Strinka, a 26-year-old canvasser with
Ohio Citizen Action, one of the main groups opposing Issue 1,
crisscrossed lawns in Westlake, a Cleveland suburb, in tie-dye
sandals, making sure that people knew the election was happening on 8
August and trying to persuade them to vote against it. Nearly all of
the voters who came to their doors that evening said they planned to
vote against the change.

“It seems like a very dirty trick to try and not get a major issue
like this pushed through in an August election,” said Matt
Jackson-McCabe, one of the voters who Strinka talked to. “I was
like, ‘This is bullshit.’”

People protest and rally in support of Issue 1 at the statehouse in
Columbus in May. Photograph: Samantha Hendrickson/AP

“It’s like pulling the wool over the people’s eyes,” said
Daniel Hayden, 76, another voter in Westlake. “Republicans – they
want to take away the control, to control everything. They want to
take control away from the people.”

Not everyone Strinka spoke with was entirely convinced. “It’s my
understanding, because I’m Republican, that this is a Democratic-led
issue. Correct?” one man said in his driveway. Strinka pointed out
that there was actually bipartisan opposition to the amendment. “It
impacts every single issue moving forward. I know a lot of people are
talking about issues for November, but this could impact
everything,” she said.

The man said he would do more research.

Republicans ‘can kind of do what they want’

Ohioans have voted on hundreds of constitutional amendments over the
last century, but they haven’t been asked to vote on one in an
August election since 1926. Last year, the turnout in August was so
anaemic, just 8%, that Republicans decided to cancel August elections
altogether.

But in May, they abruptly reversed that decision, saying that the cost
of the election was worth it ahead of the abortion measure. “If we
save 30,000 lives as a result of spending $20 million, I think
that’s a great thing,” Matt Huffman, an anti-abortion Republican
who serves as the senate president, told reporters
[[link removed]] earlier
this year.

The rush seems to be a cynical calculation that the election will have
low turnout and those who do cast a ballot will be highly motivated
‘yes’ voters.

“I think it’s a mistake to revive August elections for the sole
purpose of passing an issue of such consequence,” said Robert Taft,
a Republican who served as governor of Ohio from 1999 to 2007 and
opposes Issue 1. “If it were to pass, it’d either have, possibly
have 11 or 12% of eligible voters in Ohio deciding that the
constitution shouldn’t be amended unless 60% agree.”

And that calculation may be backfiring. Turnout during early voting
has been strong – more than 533,000 people have cast their ballots
so far. That far exceeds the 288,700 votes cast early in the May 2022
primaries. “This is gubernatorial-level turnout,” an election
official told the Associated Press
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which also reported some offices throughout the state were struggling
to staff the massive turnout.

Polling has been limited and it’s difficult to predict the results
of a ballot referendum. A USA Today/Suffolk University pol
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in July showed 57% of voters opposed Issue 1, while 26% supported it.
A different July poll [[link removed]] by Ohio
Northern University showed voters were more evenly divided.

Those who support Issue 1 argue that it’s already too easy for
citizens to amend the constitution. That isn’t supported by data;
since 1912 citizens have sent 71 constitutional amendments to the
ballot and just 19 have passed, according to Steven Steinglass
[[link removed]],
a professor emeritus at the College of Law of Cleveland State
University, who has studied the constitution.

“I think there should be that high of a threshold,” said Heidi M,
a lawyer in Cleveland who declined to give her full name. “Is it
going to be a higher burden to go out and get signatures for an
initiative? Yes, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

“The constitution is supposed to be hard to change. But the
constitution is not for making laws,” said Tomie Patton, the
president of the Republican club in Avon Lake, just west of Cleveland.
“If you don’t like the legislation then change the legislators
like we have to everywhere else.”

But in Ohio, changing the legislature isn’t so easy. In 2015, voters
overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that required
lawmakers to draw legislative districts that reflected the political
balance of Ohio over the prior decade. When it came time to draw new
districts in 2021, they should have drawn ones that reflected the
54-46 percent advantage Republicans have had in the state.

Instead, lawmakers drew maps that enabled them to keep a
supermajority. The Ohio supreme court rejected the maps five different
times, but Republicans were able to run out the clock and eventually
adopt a map in their favor. Republicans used that supermajority to
refer the measure to the ballot this year.

Republicans are well-aware of how critical that supermajority is.
“We can kind of do what we want,” Matt Huffman, the Republican
senate president, said last year
[[link removed]].

O’Connor served as the key swing vote in each of the Ohio supreme
court’s decisions until she stepped down from the court last year
because she had reached the mandatory retirement age.

Now, she said, she and other activists are drafting a constitutional
amendment that would take redistricting power away from the
legislature entirely, putting it in the hands of a panel of citizens.

“We’ll have a constitutional amendment, hopefully, and that will
change the entire playing field,” she said. “And it’s nothing
but a good thing unless you’re a member of the Republican
supermajority.”

‘Vote no’ campaign presses on

With the election edging closer, the “vote no” campaign has been
emphasizing what they say is the fundamental unfairness of what it
would mean to raise the threshold to 60%.

The same evening that Strinka knocked on doors in Westlake, a group of
volunteers with the League of Women Voters sat under the pavilion at
the local library and, over pizza, wrote postcards to voters urging
them to cast their ballots against the amendment. One of them was
Donna McGreal, 68, who said she hadn’t really been politically
active since the Vietnam war. Each of the postcards she wrote
essentially had some version of the same message.

“It’s simple,” she wrote in neat cursive on the postcards.
“Issue 1 tries to change it so 59% of the vote will lose to 41%.
Keep majority rule in Ohio.”

They’re hoping that message will resonate with voters like Sue
Kuderca, 66, a retired nurse in Youngstown, who said she was leaning
towards supporting the amendment because of her views on abortion.

“My mind is not 100% made up. It took me a while to even understand
what yes or not meant. But the abortion thing, I’m pretty adamant
about that. An abortion when ready to deliver at 9 months. That’s
murder,” she told Ron Gay, a canvasser with the Communications
Workers of America who approached her in her driveway and urged her to
vote now. (The proposed amendment in November would allow the state to
continue to prohibit abortion after fetal viability, generally at
22-23 weeks. Many states, even while Roe v Wade was fully intact, did
not allow abortions at nine months.)

“I totally understand. People feel that way about that. But that’s
in November. They’re going to take away our right to change anything
by majority vote in August,” Gay replied.

Kuderca said she would think about it.

_SAM LEVINE a national reporter covering voting rights in the United
States at the Guardian. He writes about issues such as voter ID,
partisan gerrymandering, voter purging, felon disenfranchisement and
the 2020 census._

_THE GUARDIAN is a reader-funded news organisation, with more than
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* abortion
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* Ohio
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* democracy
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* Constitution
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* amendments
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* ballot referendums
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