The Ohio Supreme Court on Monday ordered a state panel back to work to fix language describing an August ballot measure aimed at making it harder to amend the state constitution, after the justices determined that elements of words will mislead voters.
Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose immediately reconvened the Ohio Ballot Board for Tuesday afternoon.
Monday’s decision was a partial victory for One Person One Vote, the campaign opposing Issue 1, which has called for raising the threshold for passing future constitutional amendments in Ohio from a simple majority to 60%. Amid strong protests, Statehouse Republicans advanced the issue and timed it to block an abortion rights issue in the works for this fall. That’s despite the passage of a law eliminating most August elections just a few months ago.
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The high court unanimously ruled that the ballot board was wrong to describe the measure as raising the standards to qualify “any” constitutional amendment for the ballot. That’s because it imposes steep new signature-gathering requirements on citizen-initiated changes, not changes advanced by the Ohio General Assembly. If passed, it would increase the number of counties in Ohio where ballot campaigns must gather names from 44 to 88 in total.
The ballot language also misrepresented the percentage of voters required in each county to qualify a citizen-led issue for the ballot. This is 5% of those who voted in the last gubernatorial election, not 5% of all voters in that county.
Democrats pointed the error to the ballot board, which LaRose chairs as the state’s chief election officer, but LaRose chose not to fix it at this time. His fellow Republican, Attorney General Dave Yost, acknowledged the mistake in court filings, but sought to downplay it as a technicality.
![Frank LaRose](https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2023/02/640/320/frank_larose.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose called for the state’s Ballot Board to reconvene Tuesday after the state Supreme Court ruled Monday that ballot language on a controversial constitutional amendment reform question was misleading. (AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth)
The judges disagreed, and ordered the ballot board to correct the error.
Where the court split was over whether it was fair to say the proposal would “raise” the standards for qualifying and passing future constitutional amendments in Ohio. One Person One Vote argued that the term had a positive connotation that could bias voters toward a “yes” vote. They pushed “rise” or “rise” as more neutral verbs.
The Supreme Court’s four-member Republican majority ruled that “increase” could stand — on the grounds that other verbs proposed by opponents shared overlapping meanings.
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“Distinguishing between them requires parsing minute differences in connotation,” Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy wrote for the majority. “But such wordsmithing must be left to Secretary LaRose because it is not for this court to choose between words that have the same meaning.”
The court’s three Democratic justices dissented, arguing that the phrases did not meet the required impartiality test.
“Some might, not implausibly, call it a restriction or curtailment or diminution or limitation of the power of the people to amend the Constitution,” Justice Michael P. Donnelly wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Jennifer Brunner and Melody Stewart. “Instead, responding Secretary of State Frank LaRose styled it as ‘raising’ the standards to amend the Constitution. This wording creates a bias in favor of the proposal.”
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In a separate opinion, Brunner also argued that the proposal places “onerous” new requirements on citizen-led ballot initiatives that should be spelled out more clearly.