On August 8, Ohioans will head to the polls to decide Issue 1, provided they remember to do so. Summer, when most Ohioans are vacationing in the Carolinas, is a tough time to hold state elections, unless those elections are conducted entirely within Hilton Head ice cream shops. Our leaders know this, which is why they banned August elections, saying they were too costly and had low turnout.
But wait, didn’t I just say there IS an August election this year? How can there be an election in August if August elections were banned? Good question, imaginary person I contrived for the purpose of a transition. Yes, August elections were banned by the state legislature, but the state legislature’s legislation does not apply to the state legislature.
If you’re confused, then you’re paying attention.
At stake on August 8 is Issue 1, which seeks to tip the balance of who gets to decide what is constitutional away from everyday citizens in favor of lawmakers who wield power thanks to unconstitutional district maps they themselves created. Issue 1 would make it more difficult for Ohioans like you and me to change the state’s constitution, requiring a 60% vote instead of the current 50% plus one standard. That means a tiny number of Ohio voters (15% would be considered huge) will vote in an election that was not supposed to be an election on an issue that will affect all of us for years and possibly decades to come.
And there’s a perfectly good explanation for all of it.
Probably.
I don’t know.
I’ll try.
How did we get here?
In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that abortion is no longer a constitutional right. The issue would be decided by the states. In Ohio, that meant the folks who helped introduce the world to the idea that vaccines make keys stick to your body (which would be handy if true but unfortunately is false) got to decide the fate of abortion.
Shortly after Roe v. Wade was overturned, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed a motion that enacted Ohio's restrictive six-week abortion ban. The ban said physicians can perform an abortion beyond six weeks only if the procedure is to prevent someone’s death or a bodily impairment. Abortion currently is legal up to 22 weeks of pregnancy because a lot has happened since then, and that's a long story. This will get you caught up.
After the state enacted its six-week ban, the protests began, which are not words I get to write often as a journalist in Ohio because we’re a state that would rather complain loudly at Thanksgiving than leave the house and protest. Protesters said they would like to decide the abortion issue for themselves and raised the point that many women do not know they are pregnant at six weeks. For Ohio, this was a lot of commotion. Then it became even more.
Someone mailed poop to Ohio lawmakers.
"We're assuming human," Senate GOP spokesperson John Fortney said when asked about the suspected source.
That really should have been the most stomach-turning moment of the summer, but Attorney General Dave Yost grabbed the national spotlight during an interview on Fox News when he cast doubt on an Indianapolis Star story about a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim who sought an abortion in Indiana because of Ohio’s new six-week abortion ban. That story turned out to be true. Yost later said he "regrets" that people "misheard" him.
In the wake of repeated tumult, tens of thousands of women in the state registered to vote last summer, making the Buckeye state one of the fastest-growing in the country in terms of new women voters. But that energy was not enough to affect change in November, with Tim Ryan, who supports abortion rights, unable to defeat J.D. Vance.
The Republicans had prevailed.
The Republicans had not prevailed
They had not prevailed because there is a way to go around the state legislature – through the ballot box. That’s why, days after the election, Ohio Republicans introduced a resolution to make it more difficult for citizens to amend the state Constitution. Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Rep. Brian Stewart (R-Ashville) put forward the "Ohio Constitution Protection Amendment," which is "designed to help protect the Ohio Constitution from continued abuse by special interests and out-of-state activists."
The new amendment would require petition-based amendments to pass with 60% of the vote instead of a simple majority. The backers said the Constitution has been far "too susceptible" to outside groups. When asked to provide examples, they both backed slowly into a cornfield. Metaphorically. No one could cite an example or wanted to talk about how the surest way to pass the 60% threshold in the future would be with help from exactly the types of deep-pocketed special interests this measure sought to stymie.
When asked, on the record, in public, by honest workaday reporters, if this resolution was being introduced to fend off an expected abortion access petition, LaRose skirted the question. "If this is about one specific issue, then somebody's not really focused on what we're trying to accomplish here," he said.
Remember that quote.
Because it won’t matter later.
The backlash against the 60% proposal was intense, and it included 250 interest groups, which are not words I get to write very often as a journalist in Ohio because I didn’t know we had more than four interest groups (Browns Backers of Toledo being the main one). Abortion rights groups began to organize efforts to codify abortion access through a ballot initiative. Meanwhile, in an unexpected twist, the resolution to require a 60% supermajority vote for constitutional amendments to succeed did not have the 60% of the vote that lawmakers needed to get it out of the Ohio House, immediately coating the entire central region of Ohio in an impenetrable layer of irony.
After the holidays, for reasons that are too boring to fully explain, openly warring GOP factions divided the statehouse, with some Republicans backing one guy you’ve never heard of and the rest of the Republicans supporting another guy you’ve never heard of. Meanwhile, activists began gathering signatures to allow voters to decide if abortion should be legal in Ohio and submitted their proposal for a constitutional amendment.
The Democrats had prevailed.
The Democrats had not prevailed
The Democrats had not prevailed because in late March, with abortion possibly on the November ballot, the GOP suddenly remembered its lone organizing principle – stopping Democrats – and united to revive the abandoned measure to make it harder to amend the Constitution. House Joint Resolution 1 would impose the 60% threshold and other various tough-to-clear hurdles.
What transpired next sums up our modern politics perfectly: Special interest groups said they vowed to protect Ohio’s Constitution from the types of special interest groups they themselves were, resulting in the greatest headline ever published on this website.
[Editor's Note: How quickly we forget.]
The supporters of Resolution 1 said the current system is too easily influenced by outsider special interest groups. Resolution 1’s critics pointed out that special interest groups – including an outsider billionaire from Illinois who has no connection to Ohio – were the ones pushing for Issue 1. The layer of irony that had drowned Columbus had now spread as far away as Chillicothe.
In April, Ohio senators passed Resolution 1 as chants of protest echoed around the Ohio statehouse, which is a strange sentence for me to write as a journalist in Ohio because most of our collective chanting happens while drunkenly walking up and down the ramps at Cleveland Browns Stadium. News 5 answered the public’s questions about Resolution 1, all of which boiled down to, “Really?”
In May, some GOP House members started to get cold feet, casting doubt as to whether the resolution would pass. Days later, former Ohio governors – including noted liberal firebrand Bob Taft – spoke out against the proposal, telling the current GOP that voters should decide if abortion should be legal.
In the face of doubt and backlash, Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate passed the proposal. The 62-37 House vote came as hundreds of protesters demonstrated in the rotunda of the statehouse before the session opened and after House Democrats stood and started a chant – an event that startled many Ohioans who didn’t even realize Ohio had Democrats. The gallery was cleared as citizens were forced from the chamber so that legislators could vote to reduce their power.
Nothing could stop an August vote now.
Something almost stops an August vote
One day after the decision to reinstate the once-banned August special election, constitutional law experts told News 5 statehouse reporter Morgan Trau that the resolution calling for the election was illegal. Lawmakers were attempting to overturn their own ban with a resolution. "It's a direct conflict with a bedrock principle of Ohio constitutional law," said one expert.
A lawsuit was filed with the Ohio Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, language for what was now State Issue 1 was approved, even though it would later become clear no one had actually read it.
With Issue 1 now headed for a public vote, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose pulled the ultimate takesies-backsies and admitted that the proposal to make the Constitution harder to amend was "100%" due to efforts to legalize abortion. His comments to supporters saying this was all about abortion were recorded and leaked to the reporters he had told this was not about abortion.
At the local level, our journalists checked in with boards of elections who said preparations for the totally rushed August election were proceeding about as smoothly as your typical Fyre Festival.
And what about the ground game leading up to the vote? How was the vote shaping up? Two months out, Issue 1 opponents felt confident that Issue 1 would fail, totally forgetting that almost everything liberals in this state have felt confident about recently has ended with tears being cried into flavored hard seltzers.
The big legal decision everyone had been waiting for – the last real chance to head off an August vote – dropped in early June, when, along party lines, the State Supreme Court ruled in a 4-3 decision that it’s OK for the issue to be placed on an August ballot even though the legislature just outlawed such elections. The Ohio Capital Journal noted: “The Republican majority said that regardless of the law, the Ohio Constitution gives the legislature great latitude in deciding when elections will be held. In a dissent, the Democratic minority argued that while that might be the case, the legislature still has to follow the laws it has passed — and change the ones it doesn’t like.”
It was around this time that someone actually read the wording on the ballot, which resulted in this sentence being published in a major newspaper in Ohio: “Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s office sent the wrong Issue 1 ballot language to county boards of election this month.” Issue 1 is literally the only thing on the ballot. The Internet immediately ran out of “You had one job” memes. LaRose's error likely cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars and placed more stress on local boards of election. Lucky for everyone, our boards of election have been so busy scrambling to catch up they haven’t printed any ballots yet.
So, August 8 is officially a go.
Probably.
As far as any of us know.
Here are some important dates to keep in mind:
July 10: Voter registration deadline for the Aug. 8 primary
July 11: First day of early in-person voting
July 15: Certification for independent candidates
Aug. 1: Absentee ballot applications must be turned in
Aug. 8: Polls are open from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., and absentee ballots are due by close of polls.
Turnout is expected to be low outside the Mid-Atlantic coastal timeshare region.
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Joe Donatelli writes the What Happened Now? newsletter. You may remember him from similarly long articles such as What’s going on with Ohio election map redistricting, for those blessed to not be paying attention. Email: joe.donatelli@wews.com.
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Not that you would have any after reading this comprehensive and exhaustive account, but yesterday, our statehouse reporter Morgan Trau answered your questions about this totally normal and not-intentionally-designed-to-be-confusing-and-frustrating-for-everyone-involved situation.
