Citizen amendment to expand voter access blocked again by Ohio Attorney General

Yost’s task is to weigh whether the initiative’s proposed text and its summary, both of which would be circulated throughout the state while collecting signatures from voters, are in alignment.

The Ohio Organizing Collaborative, the Ohio Chapter of the NAACP, the A. Philip Randolph Institute and the Ohio Unity Coalition, said the resolution would be tweaked and resubmitted until it’s approved.

If approved by Yost, it would face another round of government review at the Ohio Ballot Board before the petition could be circulated across Ohio. It would need over 400,000 valid signatures in order to make it on the ballot.

Among other things, the proposal would create an automatic voter registration system; allow for same day voter registration or registration change; grant local elections officials the power to expand voting access but not limit it; and establish voting as a fundamental right in Ohio.

In a statement, backers said they were “dismayed” with Yost’s decision.

“Voting is our most fundamental American right that each and every one of us wants and deserves to exercise. The Attorney General has shown a repeated lack of support for this popular amendment that will guarantee an equal path to the ballot box for all Ohioans,” the Ohio Organizing Collaborative said.

In an official explanation of his verdict, Yost explained that he took issue with the initiative’s title — The Ohio Voter Bill of Rights — instead of pointing out incongruencies between the summary and the proposed constitutional text.

Yost ruled that the proposal, in spite of its title, “does not fairly or truthfully summarize the common understanding” of a bill of rights. He called the title “highly misleading and misrepresentative” and said it provided grounds on its own to reject the petition altogether.

“Rather than simply defining the rights possessed by Ohio’s voters, it focuses in detail on the processes the State uses to carry out its elections,” Yost wrote. “Those processes are not properly described as ‘rights’ and therefore cannot be fairly and truthfully said to be components of a ‘Bill of Rights.’”

Yost argued his opinion in relation to a 2023 Ohio Supreme Court ruling, which found that the title of proposed ordinances is integral to a signer’s understanding of the proposal. His decision, backed by the court’s authority, potentially sets a new standard for how the state of Ohio proceeds with citizen-proposed constitutional amendments and statutes.

“It has become commonplace to use the language of advocacy and advertising in initiated statutes and constitutional amendments. Such language will be employed, no doubt, in the campaign around such matters. At least on the formal ballot, the language should be as neutral as possible,” Yost wrote. “This office will take a skeptical view of such efforts in its reviews, regardless of which political tribe may be offering its proposal to the sovereign people.”

In the past, there have been several other state petitions with titles that included “bill of rights” that the acting Ohio Attorney General has approved. Yost explained that the office had “not always rigorously evaluated whether the title fairly or truthfully summarized a given proposed amendment,” until the Ohio Supreme Court’s decision.