COLUMBUS, Ohio — Top Ohio Republicans backing a proposal to make it harder to change the Ohio constitution have predicted a groundswell of voter participation while defending their decision to schedule a rare August election to decide the issue.
“I think a lot of people will turn out for this,” Senate President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican who played a central role in placing the measure on the ballot, said in March. “I think it’s an important issue.”
“Unless you choose to ignore it and live in a cave, there will not be any Ohioan by August who won’t be aware that there is a constitutional question on the ballot if the Legislature chooses to do that,” Secretary of State Frank LaRose, another Republican central to the proposal, told the Youngstown Vindicator in April.
But Ohio Republicans privately are preparing for a typical August election: a tuned-out summer electorate and voter turnout close to what would be a historical low for a statewide election in Ohio in the modern era.
“It’s going to be low turnout. That’s just an inherent problem with special elections,” Mitch Tulley, political director of the Ohio Republican Party, told local party officials and other GOP activists during a Thursday call planning for the Aug. 8 election. A reporter dialed into the call, which also featured Huffman and Ohio Republican Party Chair Alex Triantafilou. “It’s going be incumbent on all of us on this call and all of our friends, family contacts, other Republican activists and volunteers, to make sure that we’re getting out the vote and making sure we’re turning out as many people as humanly possible.”
Generally speaking, assumptions about voter turnout levels are a key factor in how a political party or campaign group would formulate their strategy for any given election. In a lower turnout environment, parties and campaigns typically focus on mobilizing their most loyal and reliable voters, rather than trying to spend additional resources persuading people on the fence or pulling in less frequent voters.
This general dynamic led Republican state lawmakers to ban most August elections last December, saying that school districts and other local governments typically target the month unfairly to advance requests for property tax hikes, avoiding a broader electorate that might be opposed to paying higher taxes.
But they decided to revive August elections to schedule one specifically to deal with State Issue 1, voting to do so earlier this month. Republicans have debated making it harder to amend the state constitution for years, but GOP concerns about a potential abortion-rights ballot measure in November spurred them to try to spoil it by making it harder for it to be approved.
State Issue 1 would require proposed amendments to the state constitution to get 60% in a statewide vote to pass, compared to the 50% plus-one vote standard that’s been in place for more than a century. The system is designed to allow citizen groups to bypass the state legislature, if they can collect hundreds of thousands of voter signatures, to directly present a potential law change to voters.
The measure also would make it harder for proposed amendments to qualify for the ballot by requiring amendment campaigns to collect a minimum number of signatures from all of Ohio’s 88 counties, not just half of them. In addition, it would eliminate a 10-day “cure period” during which amendment campaigns can collect additional signatures if their initial batch falls short.
Typically, Ohio has held statewide votes on ballot issues in May, when turnout generally falls in the 20-30% range, or November, when turnout typically is closer to 40% or above. November election turnout ranges higher if there are statewide candidates for office on the ballot.
But Tulley said during Thursday’s Ohio Republican Party call that the party expects turnout in August to be somewhere from 8%-12%.
He cited last August’s special election as a precedent. That election, which determined Republican and Democratic nominees for Ohio’s state legislative districts, saw historically low turnout as just 8% of eligible voters cast ballots. The state only set an August election because of a legal battle over redistricting that led state legislative district maps to not be ready in time for the planned May election.
“This is going to be a low turnout election, as all specials typically are, and if the special elections of 2022 is any indication it’ll be probably somewhere between eight and 12%,” Tulley said. “That is not a lot of people. And it’s just going be incumbent on all of us to get out there and get as many Republicans to go out and vote and vote yes on issue one.”
Dan Luschek, a spokesperson for the Ohio Republican Party, said Friday he doesn’t see an inconsistency between what the state GOP is preparing for and what Republican elected officials have said when defending their decision to set the special election for August.
“Statehouse leaders who are engaged with this know it’s a significant issue that is going to drive more people to show up at the polls, and our strategy is in line with that,” Luschek said.
Luschek also said the party is operating off historical precedent for recent August elections to guide their preparations, but state GOP officials aren’t fully sure what to expect.
There is no clear precedent for the upcoming August election because Ohio has not held a statewide vote on a ballot issue in August since 1926, according to Mike Curtin, a former Democratic state legislator and journalist who’s published a book about Ohio political history.
With the exception of last year’s legislative race, Ohio hasn’t held a statewide election in August in general in the post-World War II era.
The issue also has a strong potential to be a proxy vote on abortion rights, and could attract millions of dollars to be spent for and against the measure.
Tony Perlatti, the director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, said Friday that elections workers don’t know what to plan for with the upcoming election. Summer elections typically see voter turnout around 10%, but the State Issue 1 campaigns are expected to pump millions of dollars into ads and voter turnout operations, since the measure is a proxy issue for abortion and other hot topics.
“What we do know is this is very unique, and we don’t know what to expect,” Perlatti said. “I think turnout could be anywhere from 10% to 50%. That’s quite the range.”
In voting to place the measures on the ballot though, while deflecting criticism over their decision to schedule an August election after previously outlawing them, state Republicans consistently have been rosy in their turnout predictions.
“I have faith in Ohioans that they will show up on this issue. I believe they will come,” state Sen. Bob Peterson, a Washington Court House Republican who chaired the committee that advanced the measure, said during legislative floor debate earlier this month.
“I think the issue is sufficiently pervasive in the press that you will not see the dismally low turnout that we saw in the August special election last year,” state Rep. Bill Seitz, a Republican member of House leadership, said in April. “So I would anticipate that there would be a pretty robust turnout (this August).”
Andrew Tobias covers state politics and government for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer
Jeremy Pelzer and Jake Zuckerman contributed reporting