COLUMBUS — The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Friday that Republican state lawmakers can set an Aug. 8 special election on a proposed constitutional amendment, even though the legislature banned statewide August special elections a few months earlier.
The 4-3, party-line ruling keeps in place plans to hold a statewide vote on State Issue 1, a Republican-backed proposal to raise the threshold for passing future constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60%. It also would expand signature requirements for proposed amendments to qualify for the ballot in the first place.
In an unsigned opinion, the court’s Republican majority held that regardless of the August election ban passed by lawmakers late last year, the Ohio Constitution gives state legislators the power to submit proposed amendments to voters “as the General Assembly may prescribe.”
That wording, the majority ruling held, leaves it up to the Ohio General Assembly to determine when an election should be held on proposed amendments.
“The General Assembly’s valid exercise of its constitutional power … overrides any election statute that would otherwise prohibit the special election called for in the General Assembly’s joint resolution proposing a constitutional amendment for submission to the state’s electors,” the majority opinion stated.
The majority’s decision rejects a motion made by One Person One Vote, the main group opposing State Issue 1. The group’s coalition includes the Ohio Democratic Party, several recent former Republican governors and state attorneys general, organized labor groups, voting-rights groups, and abortion-rights advocates, who are working to place an abortion-rights amendment on the November ballot.
One Person One Vote argued in their suit that the Supreme Court should stop the special election because GOP lawmakers wrongly defied their own law that they passed months before to end August elections.
In a dissent, Democratic Justice Michael Donnelly wrote that the Ohio Constitution doesn’t give the Republican-dominated legislature the power to violate laws that it passed.
“Rather than changing the law, the General Assembly and respondent, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, want to be told that the Ohio Constitution allows the General Assembly to break its own laws,” Donnelly wrote. “Rather than doing the work themselves, they want this court to fix their mess and do their work for them. Sadly, a majority of this court obliges.”
Democratic Justice Jennifer Brunner, in a separate dissent, wrote that “constitutional provisions are not absolute,” noting that a number of laws are allowed to “burden” constitutional rights in some way — including gun-control restrictions and allowing people to be arrested and imprisoned. “What the General Assembly has done is ignore the law,” she wrote. “This, it cannot do.”
In a statement after the rule, Senate President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican who has been a leading advocate of State Issue 1, noted — as the Supreme Court majority also did — that the court made a similar ruling in 1967 that state lawmakers could set a special election date in May even though there was no state law specifically stating they could do so.
“Authority provided under the Ohio Constitution takes priority over revised code,” Huffman said. “Our Senate attorneys did an excellent job of advising on this issue.”
One Person One Vote spokesman Dennis Willard said in a statement that Friday’s ruling was “disappointing,” but he vowed that State Issue 1 opponents would defeat the proposed amendment in August.
“We’re confident Ohio voters will see Issue 1 for the scam that it is: a corrupt power grab by special interests and politicians,” Willard said.
Earlier this week, the Ohio Supreme Court’s Republican majority gave One Person One Vote a narrow victory in a separate but related lawsuit, ordering the GOP-controlled Ohio Ballot Board to fix errors in a short summary of State Issue 1 that will appear on the Aug. 8 ballot. However, the court declined to order changes to other parts of the summary language that One Person One Vote claimed was biased in favor of State Issue 1 supporters.
The ballot board rewrote the language voters will see to comply with the court’s decision.
