Why August for a special election? The supporters of Issue 1 were hoping for the same low turnout as past August elections in Ohio: only 8% voted statewide in 2022, 11.8% in Hamilton and 6.8% in Cuyahoga in 2020. Instead, yesterday Ohio voters came out in droves: in Cuyahoga and statewide, a whopping 38% turned out to vote.
And here’s the lesson: when voters turn out and vote in Ohio, Democrats win. Statewide 57% voted NO; in Cuyahoga a full 76% voted NO on Issue 1.
Republican lawmakers who put Issue 1 on the ballot were crossing their fingers that only a handful of voters would vote, mostly their own supporters. Instead, a broad coalition worked overtime to turn out the vote, and the Republican party line failed big time. Issue 1 is now in the ashbin of history, failing by 14 points, despite a ludicrous scare campaign and a heavy influx of money from Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein.
Late last year, because of those low August turnouts and high cost of running an election for so few voters, the Ohio legislature moved a bill to ban August elections. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose was one of the loudest voices cheering them on. He’s also hopes to be the Republican candidate running against Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown for the U.S. Senate in 2024.
“August special elections generate chronically low turnout because voters aren’t expecting an election to occur,” said LaRose, the state’s top elections official. “This is bad news for the civic health of our state. Interest groups often manipulatively put issues on the ballot in August because they know fewer Ohioans are paying attention. As a result, the side that wins is typically the one that has a vested interest in the passage of the issue. Voters are just as capable of voting on these important issues during the standard primary and general elections.”
But once the signature drive to put a constitutional amendment protecting reproductive rights on the November ballot kicked into high gear in the early spring of this year, suddenly LaRose — slick, smarmy, two-faced and duplicitous as always — turned into that manipulative special interest. And his interest was making sure that the reproductive rights amendment, polling at 58-59% approval, was defeated. He encouraged the legislature to put Issue 1 on the ballot — and to do so in August, ahead of the November vote.
“There will be very few people in the state not aware that there’s a constitutional question on the ballot in August,” said LaRose, a drastic turnaround from his earlier statement. “You’d have to be in a cave to perhaps not realize that issue was there.”
He also did a head-spinning about-face on why he suddenly thought the new August measure was appropriate. First he denied it was about abortion. “That’s not what this kind of change should ever be about,” he said — until suddenly in May it was: “It’s 100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution,” he told a GOP meeting in Seneca County.
LaRose openly campaigned for Issue 1, even while laughably asserting that he saw himself, as the state’s top elections official, as an impartial referee.
Now this “unbiased referee,” as he called himself recently at the City Club of Cleveland (earning jeers and laughter), will undoubtedly join the scare campaign against the reproductive rights bill, which is likely to hinge on falsehoods such as women deciding to “abort” babies in the ninth month of pregnancy or, in a real stretch, that the bill will somehow force your daughter to become a boy.
Hopefully, with voter momentum building off the Issue 1 landslide, LaRose will get a second disappointment in November — and yet another next year in his long-shot campaign to replace Sherrod Brown in the U.S. Senate.
Democracy lives one more day in Ohio.