Issue 1 would make that process more difficult, mainly by raising the voter threshold to 60% and requiring petitioners meet valid signature quotas in all 88 counties.
John Dinan, a professor at Wake Forest University and the author of “State Constitutional Politics: Governing by Amendment in the American States,” said that if Ohio were to adopt Issue 1 and require signatures from all 88 counties to put a measure on the ballot, it would join Colorado and Nevada as the only states to require petitioners to gather signatures in 100% of the chosen jurisdictions. In Nevada, that means hitting quotas in the state’s four congressional districts; in Colorado, that means hitting quotas in 35 state senate districts; in Ohio, that would mean hitting quotas in all 88 counties.
Dinan said raising the threshold for an amendment to pass to 60% would put Ohio at the second highest threshold in the country. New Hampshire requires 66% to amend the state constitution; Florida requires 60% and Colorado requires 55% — five other states have hybrid thresholds with passage rates tied to overall voter participation compared to votes on a given amendment.
Those comparisons led Dinan to conclude that Issue 1 would make Ohio’s citizen-initiated amendment process much harder to use.
“Ohio’s amendment process would be among the more difficult processes to use, in that the 60% ratification threshold would be among the most difficult and the every county geographic signature distribution requirement would be among the most difficult,” Dinan said.
Dinan noted however that Ohio has other means of altering the constitution that would still provide an outlet for semi-frequent amendments. Taking these into account, the Ohio Constitution is of average difficulty to amend and would largely remain that way if Issue 1 were to pass, he said.
“I would put things this way: Ohio’s current procedures for proposing and passing amendments generally resemble the procedures in place in a number of other states and could be considered in the broad middle of the spectrum in terms of the ease or difficulty of changing the constitution,” Dinan wrote in an email.
Dinan said Ohio lawmakers’ push to make it harder to amend the state constitution isn’t particularly unique, with several states over the past two decades attempting to pass similar measures.
“Some of these efforts to increase the difficulty of proposing and passing amendments have been rejected by voters, as with Arkansas voters’ rejection in 2022 of an effort to impose a 60% ratification rule on ballot measures, but some of these efforts have been approved by voters, as with Florida voters’ approval in 2006 of a 60% ratification rule and Colorado voters’ approval in 2016 of a 55% ratification rule,” Dinan said.
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