Ohioans vote Tuesday on a measure that would make it harder to pass future changes to the state constitution. Ideastream’s Karen Kasler explains the possible implications for abortion access in Ohio.
Sources:
NPR: A look ahead at the Ohio special election
Five Thirty Eight: Everything You Need To Know About The Ohio Ballot Measure That Could Block Abortion Rights
CNN: Ohio special election becomes proxy for abortion rights fight
PBS News Hour: Ohio voters to decide on constitutional change before determining abortion rights
The Guardian: Republicans pushed a special election in Ohio – what does it mean for abortion rights?
AP: Voters in Ohio reject GOP-backed proposal that would have made it tougher to protect abortion rights
NY Times: Ohio Voters Reject Constitutional Change Intended to Thwart Abortion Amendment
If there is interest we can add the Mississippi, Missouri, and Michigan election news here as well. They are state and local primary elections but I’ve not seen much interest by the community.
Edit: Looks like there isn’t.
Do it anyway maybe? The more informed people, the better they can be at making decisions.
This measure is so blatantly anti-democratic that I can barely understand how anyone could justify it. I get text messages from right-leaning groups though and these are the kinds of things they’re using to push this initiative:
“Radicals are targeting Ohio children. Leftist amendments to the Ohio constitution will allow children to undergo dangerous sex changes without parental consent, and allow men to dominate women’s sports. Protect your parental rights. Protect your children.“
It’s so ridiculously stupid and over-the-top, do Republicans actually believe this trash? It’s obviously about abortion, I’m surprised they don’t come out and just say it.
I voted ‘No’ on the measure, however, Brexit, of all things, did make me think about this a little more. I think Brexit was a universally stupid move for Britain and I can’t imagine something so incredibly important was left up to a slim ~51-49 vote result, when it should’ve been something more like 60-40, which could’ve prevented Brexit altogether.
Yet I’m doing the exact opposite in voting against Issue 1, which I should be in support of, since it would make it harder for potentially catastrophic initiatives from getting passed. I guess it’s painfully obvious what Republicans are trying to do here AND they’re sneaking it in during a low voter turnout special election, it’s literally the only thing on the ballot in my area. I’m contradicting myself because I don’t trust the motives of the people pushing it.
Republicans count on people’s prejudice and watching propaganda so they don’t know it is about abortion choice. They want to say woke agenda to get them to vote against their interests.
Woke people are women, minorities, LGBTQ, and non Christians. They are against us.
I thought there were laws against false advertising in the US? How can these PACs and campaigns say shit like “children will be able to get dangerous sex change operations without parental consent”?? It is so far from reality and yet it’s in every piece of conservative rhetoric at every level of politics. There’s always been “spin,” but it used to be that they’d go out of their way to pick their words very carefully, ie. dog whistle racism.
So there’s laws against lying in commercials about fast food but none that control influencing elections with misinformation? How is this kind of blatant lying even legal?
Republicans don’t care about the law.
They’re not technically wrong even if they are grossly misleading. Of course there isn’t anything like that on the November ballot. One day there could be. At least that’s what they want to scare people into believing. The reality is far from their narrative as usual. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem with outside money interfering with the political process here in Ohio. Sure, it happens more in the government (see the large recent bribery scandal). It also happens to our ballot initiatives. People collecting signatures for the two upcoming amendments aren’t necessarily volunteers and aren’t even always Ohioans. I found that out first hand when I asked the ones trying to get my signature. I still signed but it opened my eyes.
> This measure is so blatantly anti-democratic that I can barely understand how anyone could justify it.
This very thing inspired me, a person who currently works nights, to screw up my sleep schedule to vote against it.
Same. This is the second time I’ve ever voted, and I’m 35.
I guess I have to thank the Republicans for becoming insane enough to make me feel like I can no longer afford not to vote.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just vote by mail at your leisure?
The 60% threshold isn’t inherently bad, and I agree that an argument could be made for requiring at least 55% approval in order for a ballot initiative to pass. Here are my problems with the Ohio situation:
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Issue 1 would make it harder to put initiatives on the ballot, period. The big hurdle is requiring a relatively large number of signatures from EVERY county in the state. This means that a single ruby-red county could single-handedly keep an issue off of the ballot
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Ohio is so gerrymandered that ballot initiatives are about the only voice available to the population. The GOP has supermajorities in the state Senate and House, even though they only have about a 4% advantage in registered voters.
It’s absolutely critical to defeat Issue 1.
Ohio is so gerrymandered that ballot initiatives are about the only voice available to the population. The GOP has supermajorities in the state Senate and House, even though they only have about a 4% advantage in registered voters.
Even more to the gerrymandering, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled the CURRENT gerrymandered districting is unconstitutional. GOP lead house and senate in the state simply ignored it and keeps the gerrymandering which keeps them in control of the state legislature.
Ohioians few remaining ways to make their voices heard is by referendum, which is what the GOP is trying to take away here from Ohio voters.
Ohio should do two more constitutional amendments by ballot initiative.
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Require voting districts to be approved by popular vote. Elected representatives should not have that much control over who can vote for or against them
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Require any future change to the requirements for passing a ballot initiative meet the same standards it proposes in order to pass.
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Constitutions are fundamentally anti-democratic in intention.
Good analysis as usual from 538: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ohio-issue-1-abortion-ballot-measures/
For those who haven’t seen coverage yet, in brief: as usual republicans saw a defeat coming in a democratic election (the 50%+1 threshold November ballot initiative to enshrine reproductive rights into Ohio’s constitution), so they are attempting to change the rules in their favor (require constitutional amendments to get 60% of the vote, effectively allowing minority rule) in an early off-season ballot measure today.
Despite the early positive indications that this measure has an uphill battle, if you are in Ohio please vote.
Added your link.
Is this the same referendum format requiring half the votes +1 to pass? The exact thing they’re trying to kill off?
EDIT: The measure should have to be supported by the same vote threshold to pass that it seeks to impose.
The irony is even dumber since they already passed HB 458 which forbids such an election in August.
They broke their own rule, a rule that they themselves pushed through.
Don’t ever pretend that the GOP cares about rules or laws. They will literally do whatever they must to remain in power.
Thank you for this. I live in Ohio and did not know this law existed. I have not heard it brought up in any discussion or news coverage (although I admit my decision was made early and have not spent much time listening to the ‘debates’). Did LaRose and company offer any reason as to why they think HB 458 does not apply in this case?
[“As a course of action, normal course of doing business, yes, I do not believe in having elections in August as a normal way of holding elections,” he explained.
“But if the state legislature decides to hold an election in August, it’s not unusual,” said LaRose.] (https://www.npr.org/2023/08/08/1192550481/ohio-issue-1-ballot-special-election-abortion-constitutional-amendment)
Sort of the ironic soft underbelly of small-d democratic institutions. You overthrow them by winning power democratically and keeping it by force, whereas if someone wants to take it back for democracy they have to then take it by force and keep it democratically, the harder proposition.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/election-results/2023/ohio-issue-1/
Votes received and percentages of total vote
Response Votes Pct.
Yes 111,710 28.4 %
No 281,694 71.6 %
An estimated 12.6 percent of votes have been counted.As of 7:50 PM right now.
Edit 1: 7:53 PM
Yes 138,143 29.4 %
No 331,325 70.6 %Edit 2: 7:55 PM
Yes 158,861 29.1 %
No 387,174 70.9 %17.5% counted.
Edit 3: 8:04 PM
Yes 193,220 29.7 %
No 457,553 70.3 %20.8% counted.
Edit 4: 8:19 PM
Yes 232,355 30.9 %
No 519,368 69.1 %24.1% counted. Yeah I don’t see it passing.
Edit 5: 8:25 PM
Wasserman and Decision Desk already called it for No. Will see how big of a margin now, but it is clear the proposition failed.
Edit 6: 8:48 PM
Yes 376,012 37.1 %
No 638,696 62.9 %32.5% counted.
Edit 7: 8:56 PM
Washington Post projects No winning.
Yes 429,617 38.1 %
No 697,980 61.9 %36.9% counted.
Edit 8: 9:15 PM
Yes 603,050 40.7 %
No 878,360 59.3 %47.4% counted. Keep in mind a lot of the urban/city areas haven’t even counted most of their votes yet where the more rural areas have.
Edit 9: 9:22 PM
Yes 744,053 42.5 %
No 1,006,127 57.5 %56% counted.
Edit 10: 9:30 PM
Yes 809,110 42.8 %
No 1,082,764 57.2 %60.5 % counted. Urban areas still undercounted.
Edit 11: 10:06 PM
Yes 1,100,677 43.2 %
No 1,448,086 56.8 %81.5% counted.
Edit 12: 10:36 PM
Yes 1,217,867 43.4 %
No 1,585,920 56.6 %89.7% counted. Cuyahoga and Lucas counties seem to be the ones having a decent chunk to count still. Both heavily leaning No.
Edit 14: 8:33 AM
Yes 1,315,346 43.0 %
No 1,744,094 57.0 %97.9% counted. Looking like a slam dunk and massive support for No. Winner winner chicken dinner.
I really hope the numbers stay at these levels. This issue needs to not only fail, it needs to be demolished with extreme prejudice. The goons who put this on the ballot need to see that they are absolutely on the wrong side of history.
Oh boy if it stays ~30 something to ~60, the legislators may regret this. Plus if it’s 60+, the proposition will have failed by the proportion they were proposing.
Added
OK, these numbers are looking remarkably good. Definitely exceeding predictions that already had the measure being soundly defeated.
So I have to wonder… How far off are the polls nationally? We know the Republican party is shrinking, and we know that polls are getting harder to do because people under 50 tend not to answer cellphone calls from numbers they don’t know.
Is it possible that next year will actually be a landslide for both Biden and Democrats in the House and Senate? I don’t want to get too hopeful, but Ohio’s kind of a bellwether, and this… This looks good. This looks very good.
Every year, 4 million people are newly eligible to vote as they turn 18, while 2.5 million people over the age of 65 lose their ability to vote due to death.
Pray for a landslide, prepare as if we’re -2 under. I’m very optimistic.
100% agreed.
Just remember that a minimum wage increase WON in Florida with a higher percentage than Trump, even tho both candidates opposed it. If Democrats don’t run to progressive positions, they don’t benefit from the public sentiment.
I personally think Biden wins by 80%
Republicans have near zero support in the United States and the 2024 election will be an embarrassment for them.
80% is a serious exaggeration. At least 25% of the electorate would vote for Trump even if he ate a baby on live television.
A live baby. With a dull spoon.
They’d say the baby must have deserved it for some reason. And hey, at least he didn’t abort it!
Come to the rural south and you will find this isn’t true sadly.
I think it’s important to remember how close the election in 2020 was. Just looking at the popular vote:
81,282,916 for Biden 74,223,369 for Trump
46.9% of the people who voted wanted more of the same. I don’t think that number has dropped much since then.
Trump still has the support of almost half the people in the United States. It might be easier mentally to forget that, but we can’t let up. We have to treat the next election and every other election like our lives depend on it!
Suggesting that somehow ~62% of the Trump supporters from 2020 suddenly came to their senses seems pretty damn farfetched. If 10% of the people who voted for Biden in 2020 decide they don’t need to bother in 2024 because “Republicans have near zero support”, then Trump could win.
Personally, I believe if we have the same desperate need to defeat Trump in 2024, and drive turnout to the same degree, there might be a few percentage points increase in favor of Biden. If we relax and assume it’s already won, we’ll have another four years of Trump.
I actually think you should make it somewhat difficult to do direct democracy votes. There was a crisis in California a while back because the voters decided to mandate taxes don’t go up, and also spending does go up substantially. As separate propositions, both things sound good, but the reason for little-r republican representation is that if your legislator did both those things and caused a crisis you would vote them out. People in charge of institutions have longer term responsibility.
Or look at Brexit where a slight majority voted for it and a majority now regret it since it caused all the economic pain and political chaos everyone was saying it would.
So I think there is an argument for the threshold being above 50%, I think 60% is pretty high but you can make the argument, maybe something in the middle is reasonable. Preferable to me is something like a double approval process…any amendment needs to get approved by 50%+, followed by a mandatory vote in the legislature and if confirmed it would become law, but if it fails it would get another public vote where it would need to get 50%+ and if it got it, become law.
All that said, I don’t want abortion banned in Ohio, I know that’s pretty heavily a part of this vote in particular but just wanted to talk about the actual argument for a bit.
That’s not an unreasonable reaction but this one in Ohio is different in several ways.
1 The GOP super majority passed a lady abolishing August special elections that went into effect on January 2023. They are immediately ignoring this law and had to create a loophole to even hold this election.
2 It does not just raise the passing vote threshold. It mandates signatures from 100% of Ohio counties to even place a measure on the ballot. And it’s not just 1 signature is a proportion of the counties population. Idk how well you know Ohio but that is almost effectively impossible.
3 The GOP are blatantly short cutting the November election and chose 60% because polling places support for the amendment enshrining abortion rights at about 58%.
4 This is a simple majority to pass but raises it for everything else which is hypocritical. Amendments of this Nature should have to pass at the threshold they are attempting to set.
AP projects issue 1 is defeated.
This is a seems somewhat hopeful sign about the current electorate. And turnout looks much better than anticipated. 40% in many areas so far. For a special election, that’s very high.
Let’s vote Ohio! I am in Alabama but I am very interested in this.
The entire country is metro areas, suburbs, college towns, and everything else is rural Arkansas. Florida just gets that added bonus of the Sunshine Laws that do so well to expose the crazies in an efficient manner. Florida overall has not actually been full on red for decades (maybe conservative tinted, but not R red), even if it kinda feels like it.
Well the point of a constitution is to bind the future majority, so it makes sense to require significant/overwhelming majority of counties to support it.
>significant/overwhelming majority of counties
Change “counties” to “people” and I might agree. But “significant majority of counties” is just an extension of the anti-democratic bias that we see in the Senate and EC. It should always be one-person-one-vote.
But a federalist system isn’t meant to be democratic. It is supposed to guarantee rights and some influence to everyone including minorities.
Requiring a majority of counties to agree on things isn’t good for minorities in general.
It generally grants outsized power to one specific minority in particular - white rural voters.
Yes rural voters. That is again the point. Federalism is supposed to balance power between the entities of the federation- which aren’t necessarily the populace.
No.
Federalism is about division of power at different scales of government.
In a confederation, the general level of government is subordinate to the regional level. In a unitary government, regional government is subordinate to the general level.
Israel, the UK, and China are examples of unitary states. The EU is a confederation, and the US was one for about a decade before the constitution was passed.
In a federal system, different levels of government are of equal power, but have different powers. States can’t control interstate commerce; the federal government can’t regulate state speed limits except by doing something like withholding federal highway trust fund money.
While the US federal government started out as an alliance between existing colonies, states didn’t start out as an alliance of counties. US States are mostly (all?) unitary governments; Ohio counties have the powers the state government delegates to them.
Counties historically have been a matter of pragmatic. Counties are small so everyone could easily travel to their local county government on foot or horseback. They weren’t intended as a way to gerrymander state populations to entrench rural power.
There’s a reason that neither the Ohio senate nor the Ohio house follow ‘one county, one representative’. Because that would be absolutely bonkers.
What are you talking about? “Minorities” in this context refers to the people with the lower number of votes cast. They lose. It’s the very definition of voting.
“Minorities” in this context refers to the people with the lower number of votes cast.
Yes.
They lose. It’s the very definition of voting.
Not necessarily? Plenty of candidates lose the popular vote then win elections in all sorts of campaigns.
Wanting to raise the threshold isn’t inherently bad. But from what I’ve read on this their legislature previously banned August elections like this because of poor turnout and they’re also trying to make it effectively impossible to even put a measure like this on the ballot to get that increased majority by requiring a large amount of signatures from every county in the state. Meaning it would only take one county to not get enough people and it theoretically wouldn’t matter if literally every single other person in the state signed onto the petition; It wouldn’t get in the ballot.
It seems like the 60% rather than 50% is just to try and hide the ball so they can effectively outlaw popular grassroots action going directly to the ballot.
Republicans in Ohio saw what Michigan Democrats have been able to do because of constitutional amendments and shit themselves
Ballot initiatives and referendums and amendments are proving to be the bane of the Republican Party. Even in Missouri, a referendum had voters approve an ACA Medicaid expansion. Voters weren’t willing to send a majority of Democrats to the legislature to accomplish the same thing.
This is an Achilles’s Heel to the Republican strategy of total loyalty to the party. The voters can still be liberal on individual issues, and these direct democracy votes bypass party loyalty to get at the actual issue.
