Desperate people do desperate things. And right now, the Republicans in Columbus, led by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, are desperate. They’re desperate to hold onto their illegitimate, outsized power, seized by increasingly extreme gerrymandering each decade since the 1990s.
From December through June, ordinary Ohioans collected a record number of signatures for a ballot issue called Citizens Not Politicians, which will be on the ballot in November as Issue 1. It was driven by the flagrant disregard the politicians on the redistricting commission in 2021 had for the redistricting rules citizens had voted into the state constitution on 2015 (state legislative districts) and 2018 (congressional districts). District drawing experts warned us back in the early 2010s that, given the increased capacity of computer programs to identify voters down to the house, another decade of gerrymandering Ohio no longer functionally be a democracy. That happened.
Wonder why our state legislature spends more time debating where trans kids should go to the bathroom and whether drag shows should be banned than how to fairly fund education or expand access to health care or create more affordable housing or feed Ohio’s kids? Gerrymandering is why. Not only does it award Republicans 75% of the seats in the legislature and 66% of our congressional seats when they get less than 55% of the vote, but it makes most districts so uncompetitive that the result is decided in the primary. And primary voters tend to be a party’s most extreme voters — so that gives us more extreme state senators and representatives.
When Citizens Not Politicians was certified to be on the November ballot this year — it submitted so many signatures there was no way to disqualify even for bogus reasons — Secretary of State LaRose had a public meltdown on Twitter. (He was also upset that a judge overturned a portion of an Ohio bill that would have made it impossible for many housebound disabled and elderly people to vote at all.) Tasked with running nonpartisan elections, LaRose destroyed any faith that he’s capable of doing so screaming about “illegals” voting and “ballot harvesting” and ending his tweets with the Trumpian slogan “FIGHT.” An honorable person would’ve realized he could no longer keep the faith of Ohio voters and needed to resign. But LaRose isn’t that person.
I immediately predicted what LaRose’s next step would be and he didn’t make a liar of me. He descended to a disgraceful level of dishonesty: he wrote ballot language so misleading — oh heck, let’s just say, so false — that any democracy- and fairness-minded voter reading it would vote no. The problem is virtually everything he wants to force onto the ballot is a lie: it’s the talking points for the opposition campaign.
It didn’t take ESP to predict this. LaRose did the same last year when he manipulated the language of the reproductive rights issue, for instance, substituting “unborn child” for fetus. But this time it’s much, much worse. The entire premise of the language he’s written is a lie: that it would INCREASE gerrymandering and force the new nonpartisan commission, comprised of citizens who don’t hold office or work for a politcal party (one third Republicans, one third Democrats and one third not affiliated with the two major parties), to “manipulate” district boundaries.
It says that it overturns the anti-gerrymandering guidelines voters approved by overwhelming majorities in 2015 and 2018 which, if you stretch the truth and turn it upside down and backwards, is technically true — but not really. Since the members of the most recent commission — all elected officials, with five Republicans and two Democrats — simply violated those guidelines to do what they wanted, it replaces them with people who will obey the constitution and the rule of law because they don’t have a horse in the race—or a race to win or lose.
In addition, the language LaRose created and ballot board, dominated by Republicans, accepted, is lengthy, complicated and confusing — and when confronted by things they don’t understand clearly, voters tend to vote no. This is what LaRose is hoping: to trick voters into giving away their own power to assure that democracy in Ohio stays dead.
The blatantly false language is being challenged. But whatever happens, vote yes on Issue 1 for Citizens Not Politicians in November and tell all your friends to do the same.
One of the political newsletters I subscribe to said something today that could’ve been written specifically for Ohio. It said, “We can’t run a government with people whose only view is that they should have all of the power and we should have none.” That’s Ohio today. Let’s change that in November by passing Issue 1 for Citizens Not Politicians.