Ohio votes No on Issue 1, rejecting Republican anti-democracy measure

August 8, 2023 9:07 PM

Ohio voters decisively rejected Issue 1, Tuesday's sole ballot item that sought to make it tougher to amend the state constitution: under 1, constitutional amendments would have required a 60% majority instead of 50%. Ohio will be voting on whether to enshrine the right to abortion in their Constitution in November; 1 was an attempt to prevent that.

* Abortion rights groups claim victory in Ohio special election, Tyler Buchanan, Axios
* Ohio votes against Issue 1 in special election. Here's what that could mean for abortion rights., Melissa Quinn, CBS News - "Ohio voters on Tuesday definitively rejected a closely watched proposal known as Issue 1 that would've made it more difficult to amend the state constitution, delivering a crucial victory to pro-abortion rights supporters ahead of a November vote on enshrining reproductive rights in the Ohio Constitution."
* Voters in Ohio reject GOP-backed proposal that would have made it tougher to protect abortion rights, Julie Carr Smyth and Samantha Hendrickson, AP News

Popular science fiction writer and Ohio resident John Scalzi urged Ohioans to vote No on 1:

Issue 1 is so bad that every former governor and secretary of state of Ohio is basically begging voters to show up and vote against it. That’s right! There’s a solid bipartisan consensus that Issue 1 is just terrible. And they’re right! Don’t just take it from me. Take it from both Republican and Democratic Ohio politicians who actually give a crap about Ohio voters and citizens.

posted by kristi (59 comments total)

Ohio Issue 1 is a perfect example of how a vote and political choice must never be extracted from the context in which it exists.

In principle, should it take a supermajority to amend a constitution? Yes.

And yet, the only reason this proposal exists on the ballot is purely to force a majority of the state's residents to be subject to the religious strictures of a minority.

Absent the context, I would approve of Issue 1 -- but like protest votes in a two-party general election, you must vote for the result on offer, not sacrifice your safety and the safety of those around you just so your principled stance can keep you warm.
posted by tclark at 9:27 PM on August 8, 2023 [59 favorites]

I take none of these for granted but yell yes ohio
posted by zenon at 9:31 PM on August 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I saw an ad at some point that explained the proposal this way:

Ohio 59, Michigan 41
MICHIGAN WINS!

I credit that ad copywriter with singlehandedly killing Issue 1.
posted by martin q blank at 9:33 PM on August 8, 2023 [90 favorites]

By the way, if you're curious what "decisively" and "definitively" mean in numbers, the Ohio Secretary of State's site is currently showing

Yes - 43%
No - 57%

3,044,862 votes cast.
posted by kristi at 9:46 PM on August 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

Absent the context, I would approve of Issue 1

Absent the context, you still should reject it. Beyond the supermajority requirement, it also would have required signatures from every county in the state, as well as eliminating the cure period for fixing signatures.

Issue 1 was a dagger at the heart of democracy.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:54 PM on August 8, 2023 [64 favorites]

So....are the Republicans going to give up yet, or what?
posted by Toddles at 10:40 PM on August 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I doubt it. They’ll try something else.
posted by bz at 10:42 PM on August 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Gonna cautiously call this a good sign? When abortion is on the line, Republicans lose. When abortion is on the line and they dress it up as something else they also lose. And they’ve made it very clear it’s on the line in each and every vote, so that could be going somewhere.
posted by Artw at 10:54 PM on August 8, 2023 [11 favorites]

(That is, of course, a silver lining on a gigantic soup of turds)
posted by Artw at 10:54 PM on August 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Republicans won Roe v Wade. They're not quitting.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:21 PM on August 8, 2023 [15 favorites]

Republicans won Roe v Wade. They're not quitting.

The British won the Battle of Bunker Hill early in the Revolutionary War, and yet the USA is not part of the British Commonwealth.

Hitler's army won control of France in the early 1940s, and yet France is not part of Germany today.

It's possible for an entity to win a battle yet lose a war, even if they try to keep fighting. Sometimes that loss is what spurs the opposing side to gather its strength to fight back.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:40 PM on August 8, 2023 [39 favorites]

Republicans won Roe v Wade.

But not by popular vote.
posted by Toddles at 11:55 PM on August 8, 2023 [24 favorites]

To expand on NoxAeternum's comment above, I found this detail in a reddit comment:

Currently, for an amendment to get on the ballot, it would require signatures from 5% of the voters from at least 44 of Ohio's 88 counties (at least 50% of the counties, with 5% of the voters within those counties supporting the amendment). If any of those particular counties don't have enough valid signatures (some are always thrown out), there is a 10-day "cure" period to collect more signatures to meet the 5% minimum.

Under Issue 1, this would have been raised to signatures from 5% of the voters in ALL 88 counties in order to get an amendment on the ballot. This would be nigh-impossible as any conservative amendment would be shot down by liberal counties, and vice versa. Plus the 10-day cure period would have been eliminated. If any one county failed to collect valid signatures from 5% of voters within the county, the entire thing would need to start over again from scratch. No citizen-led amendments would ever get on the ballot.
That's why Issue 1 was bad for everyone.

Insidious indeed.
posted by techSupp0rt at 12:27 AM on August 9, 2023 [21 favorites]

Congratulations Ohio!

I hope this is a good omen.
posted by mumimor at 12:37 AM on August 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Popular science fiction writer, Ohio resident and MeFite!
posted by JHarris at 2:06 AM on August 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

But not by popular vote.

Where abortion rights are concerned, Republicans absolutely won the popular vote: of a court, which fellow Republicans had packed with religious loonies and other right-wing extremists. Sometimes you just need enough crooked people - or swing states, for that matter, like Ohio, to vote in a criminal like Trump, who in turn installed a few of those crazies and put us in the situation we are in today. I'm happy at today's outcome, but that reality doesn't change or slow down the religious extremists.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:10 AM on August 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm happy at today's outcome, but that reality doesn't change or slow down the religious extremists.

It does serve as a reminder, though, that the religious extremists are not in the majority, and that the majority are beginning to push back.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:31 AM on August 9, 2023 [18 favorites]

Abortion is popular. Completely banning abortion is supported by only a tiny minority of Americans. The intensity of the anti-abortion movement and Republican subversion of representative democracy give the impression that it’s more evenly divided than it is.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 3:40 AM on August 9, 2023 [26 favorites]

Completely banning abortion is supported by only a tiny minority of Americans.

As long as that number is greater than zero, we must continue to act and vote as if it is supported by the overwhelming majority.
posted by JohnFromGR at 3:55 AM on August 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, that's always been my impression. They make a lot of noise about being the silent majority, but polls consistently show their opinions are in the minority, and they get their way through loudness and playing political games, like using the Electoral College to install their presidents and then packing the Supreme Court. If they were the actual majority, they wouldn't have to resort to such measures.
posted by JHarris at 3:55 AM on August 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

It does serve as a reminder, though, that the religious extremists are not in the majority, and that the majority are beginning to push back.

Everything the Republicans did to pass this amendment -- scheduling the vote in August (which they are now blaming for its failure), lying about it constantly, etc. -- shows that they hoped to sneak a countermajoritarian amendment thru when no one was paying attention. Republicans are not embracing fascism because they are terrible, authoritarian people, but because they are not a majority in this country and they know it. Only the US's various awful countermajoritarian institutions (the Electoral College, the Senate, etc.) allow the Republican Party to hold any power nationally at all.

The Republicans have won the popular vote for president precisely once this century, and that was Bush's re-election bid after he had been installed by a partisan Supreme Court. Republicans obviously don't mind, but a system in which they get elected president against the will of a majority of people isn't sustainable.

On lack of preview, what JHarris said.
posted by Gelatin at 4:20 AM on August 9, 2023 [13 favorites]

Republicans are not embracing fascism because they are terrible, authoritarian people, but because they are not a majority in this country and they know it.

This is absolutely a los dos situation.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:30 AM on August 9, 2023 [44 favorites]

Republicans are not embracing fascism because they are terrible, authoritarian people, but because they are not a majority in this country and they know it.

They're not in the majority because they're a cabal of fascists and transparent grifters.

As David Frum said something like a decade ago, the core of the GOP will never change its positions to attract voters - instead, once public opinion shifted decisively away from them, he predicted they would quickly abandon democracy. That's exactly what happened.
posted by ryanshepard at 4:39 AM on August 9, 2023 [18 favorites]

Well, I woulda rather it had won with 60.000001% of the vote, but this’ll do.
posted by Etrigan at 4:50 AM on August 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

So....are the Republicans going to give up yet, or what?

As long as they can keep finding ways to change the rules, and loopholes to exploit.... no.

But this helped open a lot of people's eyes who may not have been aware (or chose not to be aware) of just how scummy they are. And this election really lit a fire under young people (at least in areas I was aware of).
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 4:50 AM on August 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Turns out a lot of people will show up to say they reject being unpersoned. I think a lot of my relatively conservative neighbors are absolutely appalled at being told they can’t plan their own families.

I voted early and then got the hell out of town for one last week of summer vacation. Coming to you live from Winnipeg to say fucking good for us Ohio. Now let’s do November too.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 4:53 AM on August 9, 2023 [16 favorites]

It's possible for an entity to win a battle yet lose a war, even if they try to keep fighting. Sometimes that loss is what spurs the opposing side to gather its strength to fight back.

Yes. Unfortunately, that applies to the other side as well, which is what I think was meant by the "Republicans won Roe v Wade. They're not quitting." remark. They persisted in that war against Roe v. Wade for decades having lost many individual battles along the way. They're not going to give up after this decisive loss or any other.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:53 AM on August 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

The advertising around this killed my brain cells, even from the "vote no" side sometimes. Most of the advertising was centered around "what the people you hate will do if this passes/doesn't pass" without explaining how or why.
posted by charred husk at 5:13 AM on August 9, 2023

We’re not usually a yard sign house, choosing instead to volunteer our time. But this issue put a yard sign for NO in front of our house.

Now we need to win in November, and put a ballot measure on to again address the need for a citizen led redistricting committee since the state GOP is ignoring the state Supreme Court by not implementing the most recent maps.
posted by glaucon at 5:33 AM on August 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

my relatively conservative neighbors are absolutely appalled at being told they can’t plan their own families.

Yeah, when my brother told me he and his wife (both pro-choice) voted no yesterday, I said "Well at least you cancelled out mom and dad's vote, haha." He told me they (Southern Baptist Reagan Republicans who switched to voting D a decade or so back) voted no as well. AFAIK they were pretty much single-issue anti-abortion voters until the Tea Party / Trump phenomena forced them to consider the broader implications of their party affiliation, so whatever influenced their vote yesterday, I'm glad of it.
posted by Rykey at 5:53 AM on August 9, 2023 [21 favorites]

Well, I woulda rather it had won with 60.000001% of the vote, but this’ll do.

Look at it this way - YES could've won with 50.000001%, so ironically the slimmest majority could establish a much more stringent threshold. 60% is obviously pretty hard to get.
posted by anhedonic at 6:00 AM on August 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Every Democrat running for any office, from President to Senate to local dogcatcher, should make abortion a major part of their campaign. Republicans don't win when abortion is a major factor, so make it a major factor.
posted by COD at 6:02 AM on August 9, 2023 [16 favorites]

I'll take my good news where I can get it. This was a great headline to see this morning.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:10 AM on August 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

Where abortion rights are concerned, Republicans absolutely won the popular vote: of a court

This is an interesting statement that I think nicely encapsulates something I've been thinking about recently.

I've been listening to Elie Mystal's excellent new podcast Contempt of Court, and something that's been rattling around in my head is the criticism that any checks or governance of the Supreme Court is an affront to the court's independence and impartiality.

What this criticism fails to take into account is that if you follow that argument to its logical conclusion, one is making an argument for kritocracy.

If we truly have a democracy, then the courts cannot by definition be independent and must be subservient to the legislature, which is acting as the preferences of the people. And when the courts no longer rule in a way that is a) respectful of the stated preferences of a majority of the citizenry, and b) are not ignoring citizen preference in order to protect individual rights, the courts has thus made an illegitimate ruling and should be ignored as a matter of course.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:17 AM on August 9, 2023 [9 favorites]

at least 50% of the counties, with 5% of the voters within those counties supporting the amendment)

Technically, at that stage of the process, it's not a % of voters supporting the amendment, it's just a percentage of voters who think the amendment should be on the ballot for all Ohioans to vote on.

(I mean, in practice it's probably same difference, but at least in principle you could see people agreeing that an amendment or other statewide issue should be voted on even if they personally plan to vote "no", or if they just don't have enough info on the topic at the moment. (For example, back in 2015 Ohioans rejected a marijuana legalization initiative at least partly because the language of the bill itself basically created a Big Marijuana Grower monopoly. I'm sure that when I was accosted in the middle of the summer by someone with a clipboard on my way into the grocery store asking me if I supported putting marijuana legalization on the ballot I went, "Sure!" and signed it. Then come October I went to look at the actual language of the thing and went, "whoa whoa whoa, hang on there."))

It's also not quite exact that petitioners need to collect signatures of 5% of voters in each county:

The total number of signatures on the petition must equal at least 10 percent of the total vote cast for the office of governor at the last gubernatorial election. The Secretary of State may not accept any petition for filing which does not purport to contain the minimum number of required signatures.

The signatures must have been obtained from at least 44 of the 88 counties in Ohio. From each of these 44 counties, there must be signatures equal to at least 5 percent of the total vote cast for the office of governor in that county at the last gubernatorial election.

(From The Ohio Secretary of State's page on citizen initiatives.)

Plus the 10-day cure period would have been eliminated.

And who decides if there are enough valid signatures in the first place? The Ohio Secretary of State. I'm sure Frank LaRose doesn't personally count them all himself, but yeah, the legitimacy of petition signatures comes down to one person and an invisible process. Without a cure period the power wielded by this one person is unconscionable.


AND THEN there's the part where literally literally literally earlier this year the Republican-dominated state legislature passed a bill eliminating August special elections (except for emergency US House elections) because they were an expensive waste of time with pitiful turnout. Only whoops, oh shit, a bunch of people are pissed off about Dobbs and are gonna put a reproductive freedom and health amendment to a vote in November, and votes like this have not gone well in even more reliably Republican states, nevermind, forget what we said, we're gonna try to game the system and here's your August special election.

At least anecdotally, the 88 counties thing and the cure period elimination thing and the flip flop on August elections pissed off a chunk of nominally Republican voters. So the result is good news, but it's certainly not a guarantee that the November amendment vote is a done deal.
posted by soundguy99 at 6:37 AM on August 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

Unfortunately, that applies to the other side as well, which is what I think was meant by the "Republicans won Roe v Wade. They're not quitting." remark. They persisted in that war against Roe v. Wade for decades having lost many individual battles along the way. They're not going to give up after this decisive loss or any other.

I think my fear is that while some people will read that and think "okay, then I'll make sure we need to keep fighting and push back whenever I need to", others are going to go all Bill Paxton and wail, "That's it! Game over, man!" and just admit defeat.

I was speaking more towards the latter, and how we SHOULDN'T admit defeat.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:42 AM on August 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ohio Issue 1 is a perfect example of how a vote and political choice must never be extracted from the context in which it exists.

Here's some of the context: From home rule to the initiative itself, Ohio would have never won many reforms under a 60% rule.

This is a speech given by Michael Curtis, former editor & associate publisher of The Columbus Dispatch newspaper and Dem member of the Ohio House of Representatives, to the Columbus branch of The Federalist Society.

He first notes that the citizen initiative was created by a constitutional convention in 1912 in reaction to rampant corruption.

"The big money in Ohio belonged to tycoons in iron, steel, coal, oil, machinery, banking, utilities, and railroads. They were willing to pay for the type of government they wanted. Many state and city officeholders were on company payrolls. What big business wanted more than anything else was little to no government regulation.

Reformers within both major political parties emerged, elected many of the delegates to the 1912 convention, and the spirit of reform produced 42 proposed amendments to the constitution, 34 of which were adopted by voters in the fall of 1912.

Of those 34, 19 did not achieve 60% of the vote, including some of the most important reforms in our state’s history. Such as:

Establishing a system of civil service, to end public office payrolls overflowing with family members and shirt-tail relatives. It passed with 59.99% of the vote – 41 votes shy of 60%.
Municipal Home Rule – 58.3%, and
The Initiative and Referendum – 57.5%"

Further excerpts:

"Over the 111 years since adoption of the constitutional initiative, Ohioans have been very judicious with the use of this power.

They have adopted just 19 of 71 citizen-led amendments. Vital, citizen-led reforms have included home rule power for liquor sales, the 10-mill limit on unvoted property taxes, home rule for counties, elimination of straight-ticket voting, and a recent one and one I am very proud of, because I was its co-sponsor, the 2015 anti-special interest amendment that forbids use of the initiative for the creation of any special benefit.

None of the reforms just mentioned reached a 60% passage rate."

"In 1953, the Ohio Constitution still proclaimed that the Ohio National Guard was open to white males only.

The General Assembly placed an amendment on the November 1953 ballot to remove the word “white” from the qualifications.

That amendment passed with 58.2% of the vote.

Eight years later, in November 1961, Ohioans voted on an amendment to remove the males-only language. Ohioans approved the amendment, with 50.1% of the vote.

Many essential reforms, in any era, do not reach 60%."

The whole thing is well worth a read.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:10 AM on August 9, 2023 [19 favorites]

The whole thing was an exercise in political calvinball, but on top of all of the other points already explained here, this particular one gobsmacked me.

Issue one raised the threshold for citizen/led initiatives ONLY. Meaning that amendments proposed by the legislature (like issue 1) still only need 50% +1

And one of the talking points they were parenting was how many amendments there have been, and how the state constitution needs to be protected.
Of the 127 amendments that have passed , 20 of them were citizen led.

Like it was an absolute blatant attempt to remove one of the few tools we have to course correct the legislature (since gerrymandering is still just fine here in Ohio).
And 43%+ of Ohio voters said YES.

I am enjoying the win today; it has been a while since we had one here - but holy shit, it’s exhausting here.
posted by das_2099 at 7:13 AM on August 9, 2023 [14 favorites]

Not just Trump: The Ohio abortion vote exposes the bitterness fueling the GOP war on democracy

The involvement of the local business groups on the pro side reinforces my belief that “business groups” nowhere are just the local middle class polite fascism sympathizers.
posted by Artw at 7:22 AM on August 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Business groups ANYWHERE, that is. Certainly in blue state cities.
posted by Artw at 7:36 AM on August 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

'Business groups' are anti-tax, anti-regulation, drown-government-in-a-bathtub types with a little media training.
posted by box at 7:36 AM on August 9, 2023 [9 favorites]

Frank LaRose, wearing his "running for US Senate" hat rather than his "Ohio Secretary of State" hat, continues to lie like a fucking cheap rug about Issue 1 even after its defeat:

“I’m grateful that nearly 1.3 million Ohioans stood with us in this fight, but this is only one battle in a long war. Unfortunately, we were dramatically outspent by dark money billionaires from California to New York, and the giant ‘for sale’ sign still hangs on Ohio’s constitution. Ohioans will see the devastating impact of this vote soon enough. The radical activists that opposed Issue 1 are already planning amendments to shut parents out of a child’s life-altering medical procedure, force job killing wage mandates on small businesses, prevent law abiding citizens from protecting their families and remove critical protections for our first responders. I’ve said for months now that there’s an assault coming on our constitution, and that hasn’t changed. I’m just getting started in the fight to protect Ohio’s values.”

Fuck OFF, LaRose. Cope harder, you fascist.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:51 AM on August 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

They're not in the majority because they're a cabal of fascists and transparent grifters.

Point, but broader than that, the Republican Party's "let's redistribute the other half of the nation's wealth to the top 1%" agenda is not popular. As has been remarked upon for decades now, the entire point of the culture wars is to get middle- and working-class voters to vote against their economic interests.

Part of the problem, indeed, is that the so-called "liberal media" often runs interference for them, as the plain-text description of what they claim to want is so repulsive as to sound like "biased" reporting.
posted by Gelatin at 7:51 AM on August 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

FUCK YOU FRANK LAROSE one of the biggest donors to the Yes campaign was Richard Uihlein (founder and owner of Uline), who lives in FUCKING ILLINOIS.

Also I love the "but we just didn't have time to educate the voters" bullshit. MY DUDES YOU STARTED THIS. It was YOUR idea to hold the election in August. We didn't MAKE you do it!
posted by cooker girl at 7:59 AM on August 9, 2023 [24 favorites]

Under Issue 1, this would have been raised to signatures from 5% of the voters in ALL 88 counties in order to get an amendment on the ballot. This would be nigh-impossible as any conservative amendment would be shot down by liberal counties, and vice versa.

I disagree with this bit in bold.

I don't imagine it would be much of a challenge to find 5% petition support for even the most regressive constitutional vandalism in a high-density, urban "liberal" county. Sure, the right-wingers might be a numerical minority in those places, but there are still a lot of them in absolute terms. (Even the counties that went hardest, percentage-wise, against this issue produced ~80,000 "yes" votes.)

The challenge would be the low-population counties. Finding 5% petition support for a liberal initiative in ~400 square miles containing only 12,000 people, 75% of whom are die-hard MAGA-heads, that would have been a problem.

So I just want to push back a little bit on the notion that this change could have cut both ways. I don't think that's the case. Amendment initiatives that we'd call "conservative" would have had a big advantage in the process of getting to the ballot, had this passed.
posted by Western Infidels at 8:09 AM on August 9, 2023 [11 favorites]

Let anyone think this Republican depravity is anything new, the vile spew by Frank LaRose that soundguy99 quoted above comes directly from Newt Gingrich's playbook way back in the '90s. For decades now Mitch McConnell has not missed an opportunity to use the words "job-killing" before "regulation," for example, just as LaRose does.

The language LaRose uses isn't an accident, or merely because he's a hateful person. It's because he knows the so-called "liberal media" will help him inject 20 loaded words into the public discourse for the sake of what otherwise would be a 10-word quote.
posted by Gelatin at 8:16 AM on August 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

The challenge would be the low-population counties. Finding 5% petition support for a liberal initiative in ~400 square miles containing only 12,000 people, 75% of whom are die-hard MAGA-heads, that would have been a problem.

As well as the time and effort required in finding those people, traveling to where they are, getting their physical signatures and getting enough extra signatures to cover for the inevitable ticky-tack challenges and pushback.

And the vote-yes people weren't even shy about that. One insisted that Vote Yes would "prevent rural Ohio counties' voice from being drowned out by cities." Well, yes, that's how it tends to work; the cities are where the people are. Rural counties holding de facto veto power over cities' interests was apparently fine and dandy. Others raged about "out-of-state influences" rewriting Ohio's constitution... as if Ohio voters themselves weren't the ones voting to accept or deny those alterations. One of the state GOP groups posted a picture of George Soros and declared that he was sufficient reason to vote Yes, which prompted a state rep to quip, "You know you're losing when all you have left is 'vote Yes to stop the Jews.'"

You might think that, all things in a vacuum, savvy conservatives would want a lower threshold for amendments. That way, they could have out-of-state thinktanks draft insert-your-state-name-here template amendments (the way they do now), get them onto the ballot in a straightforward manner (the way they can now) and sweep to victory because a majority of Ohioans agree with Traditional Conservative Religious Values[tm] and governing in full accordance with those... er, um... the way that they don't now.

But 50% of what Gym Jordan regularly calls "Real Americans" support that, I suppose. And those are the only ones they think should count.
posted by delfin at 8:37 AM on August 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

One insisted that Vote Yes would "prevent rural Ohio counties' voice from being drowned out by cities." Well, yes, that's how it tends to work; the cities are where the people are. Rural counties holding de facto veto power over cities' interests was apparently fine and dandy.

Yep. It's worth pointing out that the current requirement, for petition signatures to be spread across fully half of Ohio's counties, is already a huge boost to the relative importance of rural voters, and in practical terms functions as a brake on the progress of progressive amendments.
posted by Western Infidels at 9:38 AM on August 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

A New Hope in Ohio
posted by Artw at 9:59 AM on August 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

From ArtW's article: a conservative nonprofit group calling itself the Foundation for Government Accountability has been involved in efforts in other states to raise the threshold for constitutional amendments. One of its benefactors is an Illinois shipping magnate and billionaire named Richard Uihlein, who also put millions of his own money into the Issue 1 race.

Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein are U-LINE. If you have their catalog on your desk, throw it out. If you or your company use them for for supplies...STOP.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:05 AM on August 9, 2023 [18 favorites]

I think a fair amount of effort will be needed to educate voters/population in states which have previously been reasonably well-governed. This is not "rural people are stupid" -- it's more these voters are still getting used to "gotcha" politics. They're used to relatively clear-cut propositions and answers and actions rather than needing to consider "how can this relatively reasonable sounding idea be used against me in the future" that those of us in Texas, for one example, have become used to over the past 20+ yrs.

For this particular issue, I think the county-level voting results reflect the anti-choice/highly conservative Christian and Catholic distribution in Ohio - but I did raise a few consciences in my anti-choice family/friends/colleagues that voting No would still allow any future issue to voted down in a general election whereas voting yes meant whichever county was most susceptible to manipulation would determine if the issue even went to the general election. And as seen in Texas, some counties aren't that hard to manipulate, esp on issues like voting percentages in that 88 country requirement. I already had relatives not agreeing if registration rolls from the previous election were what counted vs rolls at the time of the petition, cleanliness of voter rolls, and what this meant for late registering or moving voters. And also had no agreement on if all counties simply had to submit signatures or if all had to agree to take it to general election. I'm sure some of this is in the details of the issue but none of it is well understood by the general public, and likely would be subject to further litigation.
posted by beaning at 11:37 AM on August 9, 2023

(Side note: I was surprised, but I probably shouldn't've been, to see the LaRose family getting into Republican politics. When I lived in Ohio, they were best known for running a beer-distribution company.)
posted by box at 12:28 PM on August 9, 2023

Scalzi's Issue 1 post-mortem is worth a read, particularly the items about the huge turnout and out-of-state money.
posted by kristi at 1:17 PM on August 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

For people who contemplated voting yes, had you considered WHAT ELSE they don't want you to vote on, not just in 2023, but in ALL FUTURE ELECTIONS? Is that going to be the legacy you want to leave to your children?
posted by kschang at 4:32 PM on August 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

I saw an ad at some point that explained the proposal this way:

Ohio 59, Michigan 41
MICHIGAN WINS!

I credit that ad copywriter with singlehandedly killing Issue 1.

Here it is. Incredible! I'm glad to be from Ohio right now just so I can appreciate how perfect that meme is.
posted by gueneverey at 6:19 PM on August 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

Can someone explain the 41 part of that meme to me? I get Ohio 59, but Michigan 41 eludes me. Thanks!
posted by kristi at 8:00 PM on August 9, 2023

The Ohio State : Michigan football rivalry is an active part of many Ohioans day-to-day life. Seriously

So in this context, think of those like a football score : no one here wants to see Michigan win, and the idea that Ohio would the score more points, but Michigan would win with a lower score affects people here on a primal level

It was really brilliant. I sincerely used that graphic to explain it to some people, and I honestly think they were convinced by it.
posted by das_2099 at 8:05 PM on August 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

59% of the vote + 41% of the vote = 100% of the vote is where the 41 comes from, in relation to the 59.
posted by eviemath at 4:13 AM on August 10, 2023

Speaking as somebody from Ohio who basically rolls his eyes whenever somebody brings up the whole Ohio/Michigan rivalry (especially given that OSU should've had its athletics department burned to the ground decades ago, given all of the abuse and malfeasance that have come from it), I'm glad that somebody out there finally harnessed that meme for maximum persuasive effect within the Ohio electorate. I might scoff at it as dumb jockboy granfalloonism writ large, but at the same time it seems like it worked?
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:46 AM on August 10, 2023 [1 favorite]