Issue 1 - Ohio Special Election

[Axtremus]

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/politics/2023/08/08/ohio-issue-1-special-electionresults-voters-decide-tuesday-on-august-8-ballot-issue/70487461007/

@Mik, not sure if you've talked about issue one. Any opinion you care to share?

[taiwan_girl]

The 60% majority for it too change the constitution seems to make sense. For changing a constitution, it should not be easy, so I think that a simple majority is not so good.

[jon-nyc]

TG - behind the scenes this is very much about abortion. The GOP was motivated to raise the bar to 60 because a constitutional amendment keeping abortion legal is thought very likely to pass the 50% threshold (its polling at 57-58%).

[jon-nyc]

Incidentally, the measure failed. It remains a simple majority required to amend the constitution.

[Mik]

If they had brought this up several years ago when casino companies and pot farmers were lining their pockets with cash to support their referendums to establish monopolies and it was only the 60% threshold, I might have gone for it. I've long thought it was too easy to amend the state constitution. The other provisions, which required at least 5% of gubernatorial voters from each of 88 counties and removed the ten-day period to correct signatures is the gotcha. The timing, the huge amount of dark money from out of the state and the horrible scare tactic ads made this the slimiest referendum I've seen in my lifetime.

No, a thousand times no.

[Mik]

The county breakdown shows interesting results. All the urban areas went for no, while more rural counties supported it. My county supported it pretty narrowly, but I'm swimming upstream on this one anyway.

https://www.wvxu.org/politics/2023-08-07/live-results-ohio-issue-1-constitutional-amendment