Suit seeks access for ballot initiatives
Groups in Columbus and half a dozen other Ohio communities have filed suit in federal court after their efforts to place initiatives on local ballots were blocked by elections boards.
Individuals representing ballot efforts in Youngstown and Toledo, and Athens, Medina, Meigs and Portage counties joined the filing Friday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio’s Eastern Division in Youngstown.
They’re hoping the federal court will do what state courts have not to date — rule that Ohio’s process forreviewing and potentially barringcitizen-led initiativesfrom ballots is unconstitutional.
“Just because it’s controversial or the government itself doesn’t particularly like the idea, that doesn’t mean the people shouldn’t have a right to vote on it,” said Tish O’dell, Ohio community organizer for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which is assisting the local groups with the legal challenge.
The suit names Republican Secretary of State Frank Larose, his predecessor and current Lieutenant Gov. Jon Husted, and the elections boards in each community, including all four Franklin County members.
William Lyons and Gregory Thomas Pace, the two Columbus plaintiffs, are members of the Columbus Community Bill of Rights group, which has worked for several years to place its proposed initiative before voters“to establish a community bill of rights for water, soil and air protections and to prohibit gas and oil extraction and related activities and projects.” It proposes banning most oil and gas drilling and related activities in the city.
Last year, the effort was blocked by the Franklin County Board of Elections from placing their issue before voters in the November general election.
Backers submitted the requisite valid signatures and met other requirements to qualify for the ballot. But the Franklin County Board of Elections declined to certify the issue, saying that its contents exceeded the city’s authority, and that elections officials were thus required to invalidate the initiative petitions under a state law change enacted in early 2017.
The Ohio Supreme Court later upheld the decision in a 6-1 decision. “Columbus clearly lacks the power to enact the proposed ordinance, we hold that the board members did not abuse their discretion in keeping relators’ proposal off the ballot,” the state’s highest court ruled.
Justice Patrick Fischer offered the lone dissent in that decision, writing that the court had not yet ruled definitively on the constitutionality of the 2017 law changes.
The federal court filing on Friday seeks to do just that, noting, “For several years, Ohio election statutes have unconstitutionally restricted plaintiffs’ rights to place proposed measures on the ballot by allowing defendants to engage in contentbased, pre-enactment review of proposed ballot measures.”
Plaintiffs added later in court documents that their “experience with Ohio’s ballot access scheme illustrates the effect it has on reducing speech by severely and arbitrarily restricting ballot access. If allowed to continue, this chilling effect will continue to destroy the constitutional initiative process entirely.”
“Our government is based on the premise that the people create government to protect their rights and that when government is no longer doing that, the people have the right to alter, reform or abolish that government and form a new one that does,” Susie Beiersdorfer, one of the Youngstown plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement.
“When the very government that is violating the people’s rights is blocking them from making change, we cannot accept this,” Beiersdorfer said. “We need to challenge it and protect our right to self-govern. In Ohio, we need to protect our right to direct democracy through the initiative process. That is what this lawsuit is about.”