The groups behind the effort to put abortion rights to a vote in Ohio this fall announced Wednesday that they’d officially turned in “over 700,000” signatures to get the proposal on the ballot.
Per the groups, they only needed 413,487 signatures to qualify. Organizers told TPM that they were aiming far above that threshold, to ensure plenty of buffer.
“The signatures were collected over the course of approximately 12 weeks and secured in all 88 Ohio counties,” they said in a press release.
The primary group behind the effort, Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, is made up of a coalition of other pro-abortion rights groups, including Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights, Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio.
The groups’ Wednesday press briefing was frequently punctuated by raucous applause. The speakers reminded the crowd of the state’s six-week gestational ban, which is currently blocked by a court — a symbol of the extreme precarity of abortion rights in a state government by a Republican governor, Republican-majority legislature and a state Supreme Court that is newly heavily dominated by conservatives.
The abortion rights groups had already surmounted other hurdles, including getting the ballot text of the amendment — “The Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety” — okayed by mostly Republican officials.
Meanwhile, Republican state legislators have been pushing their own ballot amendment, transparently meant to sink the abortion rights effort.
Among other things, the Republican proposal would raise the threshold for citizen-initiated ballot amendments to 60 percent from its current simple majority. Proposals initiated in the legislature, interestingly, would not be subject to an increased threshold.
The Republicans’ amendment would land on the ballot in an oddly timed August election — three months before the abortion one goes before voters.
Wednesday’s signature submission is one of the last, and most significant, boxes for the pro-abortion rights groups to check. The organizers were hellbent on getting the amendment on the ballot in 2023, a much quieter electoral cycle than 2024, and one where nationwide money and support for expanding abortion rights could be channeled to their effort, the only game in town. Many other states are working on their own ballot amendment efforts, most of which are slated for next year.
“For those who wonder can this be done, can we defeat the anti-democracy efforts in August and can we pass this amendment in November, let me tell you something — this coalition has been up against the full force of the corrupt government in Columbus for a decade and we still have abortion access in every corner of the state,” Kellie Copeland, executive director of Pro-Choice Ohio, said Wednesday. “We will win in August when we vote no and we will win in November when we vote yes.”
I hope they are successful. This rush to subvert the will of the people by a vocal minority needs to stop.
People power can beat a repressive divisive would-be power monopoly. Find a group to help you phone bank into Ohio! Contact voters and urge them to vote!
What is happening is that they are separating “abortion” from elections of state legislators and the elected executives to include the governor and AG.
I am not sure that is a good idea or not.
It seems to me the best way to defeat “anti-democratic efforts” and " the corrupt government in Columbus" is not to remove there power on a single issue but rather to remove their power on all issues by using the issue of reproductive rights to defeat the “corrupt government” and “anti-democratic efforts” when they are up for election. I mean when it comes to governors, AGs and other state wide offices, gerrymandering is not the problem.
Two really disturbing trends on display here
The first is state legislatures raising the bar to impossible heights for citizen initiatives. The innumerate American public have no idea how hard it is to get a 60% vote on anything. Arizona just passed a constitutional amendment to require a 60% vote for voters to pass ballot measures to approve taxes. This amendment was barely passed 50.72% to 49.28%, but no one apparently sees the complete irony in that.
Last year, Arizonans gathered almost 400,000 signatures to put a measure on the ballot reversing a lot of the voting suppression measures the AZ legislature had passed. Here is some of what transpired
Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and the GOP leaders of the House and Senate had urged the high court to reject all three measures. Ducey has appointed five of the seven justices.
Mikitish has presided over three weeks of hearings in a case filed by a pro-business group that challenged many of the nearly 400,000 signatures the initiative backers filed. After lawyers for the Arizona Free Enterprise Club succeeded in knocking off nearly 96,000 signatures, and a county review to determine if the signatures were valid kicked off nearly 64,000 more, it was left with just 2,281 more than the required 237,645 signatures needed to make the ballot.
In Friday, Mikitish flipped those numbers.
The Free and Fair Elections measure sought to change a slew of election laws. It would have specifically blocked the Legislature from overturning the results of presidential elections, an avenue some Republicans explored after former President Donald Trump’s loss in the state in 2020.
It also would have guaranteed ballot privacy and bars handing election materials or ballots over to outside groups like the state Senate did after 2020, expanded voting access, mandated that all voters can go to any polling site, extended early voting and limited lobbyists’ ability to wine and dine lawmakers.
The measure also would eliminate the “strict compliance” legal standard that led Mikitish to disqualify many of the petition sheets. The GOP-controlled Legislature required that standard for initiatives in 2017, making it easier to throw them out for relatively minor paperwork errors.
The Free Enterprise Club challenged tens of thousands of signatures, many for exceptionally minor issues.
For instance, 7,000 signatures were challenged because a volunteer petition circulator mistakenly checked a box that indicated they were paid circulators.
Still, with all that, it still required the AZ Supreme Court (expanded and packed by Ducey several years earlier) to just simply say throw it out. It will be interesting to see what happens in Ohio.
We got completely screwed here in AZ under the guise of legality and it continues to happen every day.
I’m a bit confused. The signature requirement has been met under currently existing law. The Ohio lege is attempting to change the rules with some weird ballot stunt in August. Shouldn’t the rule existing at the time of submission apply. Wouldn’t a changed rule be ex post facto?