Voters in Ohio went to the polls to decide whether to approve a measure known as Issue 1 that would raise the bar for constitutional amendments on the ballot. In the ultimate irony, the vote against changing the amendment process exceeded the 60% supermajority that the special election was seeking to require in the first place.
One part of the proposal that wasn’t getting as much attention is that it upped the requirement for ballot measures from having to get signatures in 44 districts (half of them) to needing signatures in all 88. That was to try and suppress grass roots efforts from even getting on the ballot. Such an undemocratic bunch of chucklefucks.
Holy shit. That would have meant almost no grassroots ballot measures would get off the ground. People would be forced to hire groups all across the state to drive and get signatures from random rural fuck off counties.
That’s a bingo.
terrifying. Here in Aus my state requires a simple majority. There would be riots, good on you Ohio.
It also removed the signature curing period, meaning that there is no second chance to get more signatures or any of the originals get thrown out. For example, there is a recreational marijuana initiative that people are trying to get on the ballot in November. When they turned in signatures, it was found that they were, iirc, 639 signatures short. Under the current rules (which will remain) they had 10 days to come up with what they needed. Last I saw, they had gotten over 6,000, so that’s cool.
Did they sneak it in as part of issue 1?