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Voters in Ohio yesterday smacked down a constitutional amendment that would have made it harder for voters to pass ballot initiatives, overwhelmingly defeating the Republican-backed proposal. “Issue 1” would have increased the voting threshold for passing a constitutional amendment from a simple majority, as it’s been for over a century, to 60 percent. Republicans in the very gerrymandered Ohio Legislature saw the amendment as a chance to head off a planned initiative to protect abortion rights in the state, but too bad, so sad: Issue 1, the only thing on yesterday’s ballot, failed by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent, with 99 percent of votes counted.
Just to help goose the measure’s chances, Republicans tried to discourage turnout by scheduling the special election for August, when people usually stop paying attention to politics unless there’s some particularly awful fuckery afoot. To add to the absurdly transparent attempt at ratfucking the vote, yesterday’s special election required its very own exception to a law Republicans passed last year that ended August elections, because nobody votes in ‘em and they cost so much to administer.
Turns out that when people DO see Republicans trying to load the odds in their favor, particularly when it comes to trying to do an end-run around protecting abortion rights, they turn out like crazy. In fact, Ohioans cast around 2.8 million votes for this August off-year election, far surpassing the 1.66 million votes in 2022’s primary election, which chose candidates for both parties for governor, US Senate, and the US House.
Republicans tried, occasionally, to pretend that the vote wasn’t about making sure the state’s strict abortion law stays in place, claiming from time to time that amending the state constitution shouldn’t be too easy, but voters saw it for what it was: not just a way to block November’s initiative on abortion, but also to throatcram minority rule even further in a state where Republicans usually get around 54 percent of the vote, but have gerrymandered themselves a 70 percent majority in both the state House and Senate.
Former congressman Tim Ryan (D) told the Washington Post (gift linky) that the open assault on democratic norms brought traditional, non-MAGA Republicans — both of them, perhaps — to the polls, too: “A lot of libertarian Republicans were turned off by this proposal that they saw as crafted by political hacks,” he told columnist EJ Dionne.
Dionne goes on:
The laughable sneakiness of Ohio Republicans should force a larger national debate over efforts to undercut majority rule. “This is a clear instance of a more general problem plaguing American democracy today, especially in the states: increased partisan efforts to take decisions out of the hands of popular majorities,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of the forthcoming book Tyranny of the Minority with his colleague Steven Levitsky. [Wonkette-gets-a-cut link added — Dok Zoom]
In addition to trying to hide the referendum in a summertime election, supporters of Issue 1, perhaps recognizing that the big early vote numbers didn’t bode well, also lied about the measure to scare people. Why, if Ohio didn’t make voting harder, then terrifying out-of-state liberal groups would come for your children!
One TV ad from an anti-abortion group showed a parent tucking a sweet little girl into bed, as a female narrator warned,
“You promised you’d keep the bad guys away. Protect her. Now’s your chance. Out-of-state special interests that put trans ideology in classrooms and encourage sex changes for kids are hiding behind slick ads. Don’t be fooled. You can keep this madness out of Ohio classrooms and protect your rights as a parent by voting ‘yes’ on August 8.”
We do feel compelled to add that absolutely nobody is encouraging “sex change for kids,” no matter how many time rightwingers insist that’s the case. But it’s OK, they were lying to save the babies, except for how that too is a lie.
Republicans keep losing in their attempts to game the system and prevent voters from protecting abortion rights. Considering how mad that’s been making voters, we can only say that Republicans should keep talking up how much they want to restrict women’s rights — as long as it keeps failing this spectacularly.
[WaPo (guest link) / AP / Ohio Capital Journal /NYT / Columbus Dispatch / Photo: Lisa Zins, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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