Wednesday’s party line board means Ohioans’ ballots will include language that Issue 1 opponents have celebrated and that proponents have framed as intentionally misleading. The final approval came just a few days before Ohio boards of elections are scheduled to begin mailing ballots to Ohio military personnel overseas.
In its Monday decision, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled two of 10 sections of the board’s previously-adopted language violated the Ohio Constitution’s requirement that the ballot language not be misleading.
One such defect in the previous language was the flat assertion that Issue 1 would “limit the right of Ohio citizens to freely express their opinions to members of the commission.”
The court required that the ballot board expound on this point, so the board made clear that, under Issue 1, Ohioans could indeed freely express their opinions, just not in any context “other than through designated meetings, hearings and an online public portal.”
The ballot board also made a point of clarification to the assertion that Ohio citizens would be prohibited from filing a Supreme Court challenge against the citizen panel’s redistricting plan “except if the lawsuit challenges the proportionality standard” that’s written in Issue 1.
Given that this is false, the board added that challenges to the maps could also pertain “to an incumbent elected official’s residence, or the expression of certain senators’ terms.”
Despite the fixes, Issue 1 proponents said it wasn’t enough to remove the overall bias in the board’s language. At the ballot box, voters will read that the citizen redistricting panel would be “required to gerrymander the boundaries,” according to the ballot board’s language that had been approved by the four Republicans on the Ohio Supreme Court, but not the court’s Democrats.
“This was done and it was created for the main purpose of hoodwinking voters,” Sen. Paula Hicks-Hudson, D-Toledo, told reporters after the Ohio Ballot Board vote. She was one of two Democrats on the board, both of whom voted against the language but were outvoted by the board’s three Republicans.
Hicks-Hudson had all four of her suggestions denied by the board’s Republican majority over the course of the meeting, including a motion to plainly print the actual language Issue 1 proposes on the ballots.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who leads the ballot board and pushed back against accusations from Hicks-Hudson that he was acting disingenuously, did not take questions from the press following the vote, nor did he take questions at the previous ballot board meeting.
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Avery Kreemer can be reached at 614-981-1422, on X, via email, or you can drop him a comment/tip with the survey below.
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