A lot has happened since word came down on March 13 that the Ohio Ballot Board approved the “Right to Reproductive Freedom with Protections for Health and Safety” constitutional amendment, saying it complies with Ohio’s single-subject rule. This allowed the coalition of Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom and Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights to begin collecting signatures to place the issue on the November ballot. With 413,000 valid signatures required by July 5, the organizations set a goal to collect 700,000. Find a petition here.
The petitions have been printed, trainings for signature collectors have been held (and are still being held, if you want to get involved) and signature gathering efforts are cropping up at coffee shops, concerts, burlesque and drag shows, and art openings, among other places. Find a location here.
All six states which have placed such an issue on the ballot — even conservative states such as Kentucky and Kansas — have passed it. So the forces that want to relegate women to the status of reproductive chattel have panicked and are showing they’re willing to torch Ohio’s already dangerously weakened democracy to achieve their goal. Knowing they likely can’t win at the polls, they’re looking for procedural blocks.
One group is going to the state supreme court begging for help in the form of a lawsuit demanding that the Ohio Ballot Board’s “single subject” ruling be overturned, which would mean that the reproductive rights coalition would have to start the entire process over and be virtually unable to meet the July 5 deadline.
Meanwhile, the Ohio legislature, urged on by Ohio’s voter suppressor-in-chief Frank “Jim Crow” LaRose, has decided that, after banning August elections following last summer’s costly, low-turnout debacle (necessitated in part by LaRose’s own games), it wants to repeal the ban in order to hold another expensive, low-turnout August election to ask voters to make the already-challenging process of amending Ohio’s constitution so much more difficult as to be nearly impossible. It wants to do this so that the new rule that an amendment must pass by 60% instead of 50% will be in place in November. It’s clearly noted that polls say around 59% of Ohioans approve of reproductive freedom.
Laughably, these anti-voter Republicans are saying that it’s protecting the state constitution against big-money outside special interests — the very same ones pushing for changing the rules. But it’s not that easy to amend the constitution at the ballot and ballot issues that don’t have popular support or are mischaracterized by big-money campaigns by out-of-state special interests (such as the 2012 ballot issues that would have created an independent redistricting commission and likely derailed all of these anti-voter efforts) usually lose.
The one positive note is that ballot issues asking voters to give up their power tend to fail as well, and if this 60% threshold does go to an August election, the hundreds of signature collecting efforts on behalf of reproductive rights can alert people to this election and get out their vote.
In any case, the petitions are out there all over the place, and if you haven’t signed already, please find one and do so. You can check out locations —ranging from Cleveland State University to Tommy’s restaurant on Coventry — at this link.