Ohio’s One-Issue Election

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/briefing/ohio-election.html

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Early this year, Ohio legislators ended the practice of regularly holding elections in August, pointing to high costs and low turnout. A few months later, the state’s legislature put a measure on the August ballot anyway, one that would make it harder to pass constitutional amendments. It will be the only thing on state ballots when voters head to the polls today.

Why the turnabout? Republicans, who control the legislature, are trying to block a potential victory for abortion rights. If the measure passes, it could pre-empt a November vote on whether to enshrine abortion rights in Ohio’s Constitution.

Today’s initiative would raise the threshold for approving constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60 percent of the vote. Supporters have been clear that the measure is meant to make it harder for November’s abortion rights amendment to pass.

“This is 100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution,” Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who’s also running for U.S. Senate, said. “The left wants to jam it in there this coming November.”

Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last year, voters across the country have approved multiple ballot initiatives protecting abortion rights. A surge of support for abortion rights also appears to be driving greater support for Democrats in some close elections.

Ohio Republicans are trying to stem the backlash in their state by limiting voters’ power. “Once, Ohio was the quintessential swing state,” my colleague Michael Wines, who covers voting and other election issues, wrote. “Now, on issues such as education, voting and abortion, it is an exemplar of a nationwide phenomenon: one-party-controlled legislatures, almost invariably Republican ones, changing the rules of the democratic process to extend their control even further.”

November’s abortion rights amendment would establish a right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” including on abortion. Polls suggest most Ohioans support the amendment. But Republicans oppose it and have gone to great lengths, including filing a lawsuit to the Ohio Supreme Court, to block it.

If it passes, today’s ballot measure, called Issue 1, would also make it more difficult to put the issue in front of voters again, by requiring petition signatures from each Ohio county for future constitutional amendments. That would be the strictest requirement for any state that allows voter-led amendments, said Jonathan Entin, a constitutional law expert at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

“It is antidemocratic in the strictest sense of the word,” Kerri Milita, a political scientist at Illinois State University, told me. She has studied other instances in which lawmakers have tried to limit ballot measures, and has found it most often happens when legislators are at odds with public opinion.

Republicans have made other arguments for raising the threshold for state constitutional amendments. LaRose, for one, has pointed out that the Ohio Constitution has been amended 172 times, compared with the 27 times that the U.S. Constitution has been modified. That frequency, he argues, is evidence that the state constitution is too easy to change. Some experts argue that such easy-to-pass constitutional amendments can make it too difficult for legislators to govern, since lawmakers cannot change them without bringing the issue back to voters.

But those considerations have received little attention compared with the fight over abortion rights.

Ohio’s vote today could jump-start other efforts. If the ballot measure succeeds, abortion opponents may try a similar approach elsewhere. Republicans are already considering ways to make it harder to pass ballot initiatives in Florida, Idaho, Missouri and other states.

Advocates are working to put abortion rights on the ballot in more states. Among them is Florida, which already requires that ballot initiatives get 60 percent of votes to pass. Supporters are trying to get the measure on Florida’s ballot during next year’s presidential election, and there are similar initiatives in Arizona, Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota.

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Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — German

P.S. New assignments: Robin Pogrebin will write about California culture, and Adam Nagourney will cover the 2024 presidential race.