Ohio ballot issues may face more hurdles
Area lawmaker part of effffffffffffort on constitutional amendment process.
A Miami Valley law maker wants tomake it more difficult to put issues and constitutional amendments before Ohio voters.
AMiamiValley lawmakerwants to make it more diffifficult to put issues and constitutional amendments before Ohio voters.
Niraj Antani, R-Miamisburg, introduced a joint resolution that wouldincrease thenumber of signatures needed to get an itemon the ballot and increase the vote total needed to pass a measure from a majority to 60 percent.
The goal, Antani said, is to keep out-of-state interests out of Ohio politics.
“It is time for Ohioans to take our initiative process back and stopwell-funded, out-of-state special interests from coming into our state and wreaking havoc,” Antani said in announcing the resolution.
The joint resolution would amend Ohio’s constitution and would have to go before voters to be approved if passed by the legislature.
The measure would also ban campaigns from paying the peoplewho collect signatures for ballot issue petitions.
“It should be diffifficult,” Antani said of the process to get something on the ballot. “You’re amending the constitution.”
Theproposedruleswouldapply to both citizen initiated constitutional amendments and initiated statutes.
Antani cited the recreational marijuana issue in 2015 and the current Issue 2 on prescription drug prices as instances when out-of-state groups fundedmeasures on Ohio’s ballot.
Support for Issue 2 has been almost entirely funded by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a
California-based nonprofit that serves 800,000 HIV and AIDS patients around the globe, including in Ohio.
The nonprofit spent more than $1.8 million on a consulting company to hire petition signature gatherers. The price-per-signature to get Issue 2 on the ballot was $10.13.
Antani said he had to go back 13 years, to the Ohio DefinitionofMarriageamendment in 2004 to find a ballot issue thatwas initiated at a grass-roots level in Ohio.
Financial support for that ballotissuecamemainlyfrom Citizens for Community Values, which is an Ohio organization, but is an arm of the national Family Research Council, whichpushedsamesex marriage bans across the country in the early 2000s.
“Time and time again for the last 13 years it has been special interests and out-ofstate interests,” Antani said.
Ohio’s process to getmeasures on the ballot and ultimately change the state constitution is fairly minimal compared to some other states and to the federal process, according to Mark Caleb Smith, director of the Center for Political Studies at Cedarville University.
“Makingithardertoamend the constitution isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” he said.
Every change thatmakes it harder for out-of-state interests to get on the ballot, however, will alsomake it harder for Ohio residents to initiate a ballot issue.
“It’s interesting tobepushing this direction when it looks like politics across the country is becoming more populous,” Smith said. “I’m not sure how it will fit politically.”
Other states require a supermajority to pass constitutional amendments, but no others have that high of a threshold for passing state statutes, according to Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan elections resource.
Florida and Illinois require a 60 percent supermajority to pass a constitutional amendment. Colorado just increased the threshold to 55 percent.
No other state bans paymenttothosewhocollect signatures, according to Ballotpedia, but some ban paying themper signature. Ohiohad such a ban, but itwas struck down by a federal court in 2006 as unconstitutional.
Of 76 citizen-initiatedmeasures on statewide ballots in 2016, only seven were achieved using volunteers to gather signatures. Those occurred in North Dakota and South Dakota where about 13,000signatureswere required per ballotmeasure compared to Ohio’s more than 180,000 for Issue 2 and more than300,000for Issue 1 this year.