COLUMBUS, Ohio — A Republican-controlled panel has approved new ballot language for State Issue 1, the proposal to make it harder to change the Ohio constitution, a day after the Ohio Supreme Court ordered that the language be rewritten to remove the inaccuracies in a previously approved version.
The version approved by the Ohio Ballot Board on Tuesday, which summarizes for voters what State Issue 1 would do if passed, removed the offending language: a section that inaccurately described tougher signature-gathering requirements for amendment campaigns. It also nixed a word — “any” — that the court said falsely gave the impression that the signature-gathering requirements also might apply to proposed amendments from the state legislature.
“There’s no mechanism to ask the court to bless the language,” Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who chairs the ballot board, said during Tuesday’s meeting. “But what we did was go through the court’s decision and annotate each of the things that they ordered, and we believe we adequately responded to that.”
The vote occurred along party lines, with the ballot board’s three Republicans voting “yes” and its two Democrats voting “no.” Republicans rejected motions from Democrats to change the language further, including declining to add a sentence specifying the higher voter approval threshold for amendments that State Issue 1 would require.
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State Issue 1, if voters approve it, would amend the state constitution to require future amendments to get a 60% supermajority in a statewide vote in order to pass. That’s compared to the current 50% simple majority standard that’s been in place for more than a century.
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It also would make it significantly harder for potential ballot issues to qualify by expanding mandatory signature-gathering requirements for citizen-initiated amendment campaigns. It would require campaigns to collect a minimum number of signatures from all 88 counties to qualify for the ballot, compared to the current 44 counties.
An election will be held on Aug. 8 to decide the issue. A “yes” vote would approve the changes while a “no” vote would reject them.
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State officials have debated making it harder to amend the state constitution for years. But Republicans fast-tracked State Issue 1 specifically to try to foil an expected November ballot measure that would add legal protections for abortion to the state constitution.
Republican lawmakers voted last month to put State Issue 1 up for a vote, setting an Aug. 8 election. Part of the process of putting a constitutional amendment up for a vote is writing ballot language describing the measure’s effects.
While the language carries no legal weight per se, standards for the language appear in the Ohio Constitution, which says it must “properly identify the substance of the proposal to be voted upon.”
The Ohio Ballot Board approved the first version of the ballot language on May 18. A campaign group opposing State Issue 1, One Person One Vote, sued on May 23, saying the summary language that Republicans approved was illegally biased and meant to aid the measure’s passage. It also said parts were inaccurate. It asked the court to order that the language be rewritten.
The four Republican justices on the seven-member court agreed with part of the group’s arguments: that the measure contained inaccurate language.
But it rejected the group’s more expansive claims, including refusing to force the Ohio Ballot Board to more explicitly describe that State Issue 1 would raise the voter-approval threshold for constitutional amendments from 50% to 60%.
Asked on Tuesday why Republicans declined to add the extra sentence explaining the higher voter approval threshold in State Issue 1, LaRose said that information will appear separately in the form of official written arguments submitted by proponents and opponents of the measure.
Those formal arguments will be available at polling places for the Aug. 8 election, and typically are posted on the walls, although voters may not see them unless they seek them out.
“That’s the appropriate place for, this is the current number, this is what the number should be,” LaRose said. “I don’t think we want to overcomplicate the ballot language. I think that we want to put in front of the voters what they’re being asked to approve, and that’s exactly what they’ve done.”
State Sen. Bill Demora, a Columbus Democrat who sits on the ballot board, said following Tuesday’s meeting that the new ballot language is technically an improvement compared to the previous version, since it no longer contains inaccuracies.
But he said the language remains unfair.
“The language is unfair. This language shouldn’t be happening in August, because they just outlawed it, they didn’t apply the appropriate appropriations for this election. The whole thing from start to finish is a joke,” Demora said.
Don McTigue, the lawyer for One Person One Vote, submitted some proposed changes to the Ballot Board ahead of Tuesday’s meeting. Republicans rejected them.
McTigue, a longtime Democratic elections attorney in Columbus, said he will talk to his client about whether it wants to sue the ballot board again over the latest version of the language.
Any potential lawsuit would face a time crunch. There’s a legally mandated period for each side to submit written arguments. The court then would have to take time to consider an issue a ruling. Meanwhile, military ballots are due to be mailed on Friday, June 23.
“It’s not a time crunch created by my client,” McTigue said. “It’s a time crunch that would be created by the ballot board.”
A second State Issue 1-related lawsuit from One Person One Vote remains pending before the Ohio Supreme Court. That case, filed on May 12, asks the court to block the Aug. 8 election entirely, arguing the state legislature failed to properly undo a previous law change they passed in December that outlawed most August special elections in Ohio.
Andrew Tobias covers state politics and government for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer
Here is the new ballot language approved on Tuesday:
The revised version of ballot language summarizing the effects of State Issue 1 approved by the Ohio Ballot Board on June 13, 2023.
Here is the original ballot language that was rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court:
The language summarizing what State Issue 1 as it will appear on the ballot.