The Gavel outside the Supreme Court of the State of Ohio, September 20, 2023, at 65 S. Front Street, Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original article.)
The Ohio Supreme Court spelled out the authority the state attorney general has when it comes to approving or rejecting constitutional amendment initiatives in a ruling Wednesday.
The court ruled unanimously that Attorney General Dave Yost shouldn’t have rejected the Ohio Voters Bill of Rights proposal based on the title of the initiative.
The proposed amendment would amend the Ohio Constitution’s regulations for subjects like voter qualification, registration, and absentee ballots.
The amendment seeks to give eligible Ohioans rights to in-person voting and military and overseas absentee voting, 28 days of early voting, automatic voter registration and updating, same-day voter registration, and no-excuse absentee voting.
It also touches on the topic of drop boxes, which have been hotly debated in this and previous elections. The proposal would give local election authorities “the discretion to place multiple secure drop boxes throughout their counties.”
Yost rejected a second revision of the amendment in January, saying the title “does not fairly or accurately summarize or describe the actual content of the proposed amendment.”
“In the past, this Office has not always rigorously evaluated whether the title fairly or truthfully summarized a given proposed amendment,” Yost wrote. “But recent authority from the Ohio Supreme Court has confirmed that the title for a ballot initiative is material to voters.”
Yost said “in our time of heightened polarization and partisanship,” a title has “even greater importance” to voters.
Those challenging Yost’s rejection asked the court to certify the proposal “contending that the attorney general is not authorized to review the title of a proposed constitutional amendment because the title is not part of the ‘summary,’” according to court documents.
The justices on the supreme court agreed that the attorney general couldn’t reject the initiative based on the title, but did not agree to order him to certify the measure immediately.
In their decision, the court ordered Yost to “examine the summary of relators’ proposed amendment, determine whether the summary is a fair and truthful statement of the proposed amendment, and, if so, certify and forward relators’ petition to the Ohio Ballot Board.”
“Other than the title, the attorney general did not identify any part of the summary that was defective,” the court wrote.
The proposed ballot initiative is one of several constitutional amendments that have been offered in the last few years. In 2023, an amendment that enshrined reproductive rights including abortion into the state constitution was approved by 57% of voters. Voters rejected another attempt at amending the constitution that August, when state lawmakers brought forth a proposal to make the constitution harder to amend by increasing the threshold to approve such amendments.
This year, voters will again be voting on a constitutional amendment, this time to overhaul the state’s redistricting process. Issue 1 would create a 15-person citizens redistricting commission vetted by state judges for conflicts of interest. The commission would replace the Ohio Redistricting Commission, the all-elected group that has created the last six Statehouse maps and two congressional maps. Five of the Statehouse maps were ruled unconstitutionally gerrymandered by the Ohio Supreme Court, and both congressional maps were also rejected by the court.
The initiative that would become Issue 1 went through a number of revisions by Citizens Not Politicians before it made its way to the ballot, after Yost rejected the proposed amendment language.
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