OH O-HI-O!!!

My home state of Ohio topped the national news earlier this week in a litmus test for the GOP’s less than prudent bet against women’s reproductive rights.  But while abortion rights topped the agenda of Ohio’s Issue One, which was soundly defeated in a special referendum on Tuesday, it also piggybacked other themes that were aimed at expanding the power of state and at restricting the influence that the people can exert on their elected officials.

Conservatives portrayed the referendum as vital to “protecting the state constitution.” But, in fact, it was an attempt to make it harder for common citizens to introduce constitutional amendments. Since 1912, amendments have been passed in the state by a simple majority (fifty percent plus one). Issue One was designed to raise that bar to sixty percent.

It is worth noting that, historically, less than a third of amendments to the Ohio constitution have passed by a sixty percent majority or more. But that wasn’t the only way in which Issue One would have restricted citizens’ political power. According to the terms of the referendum, citizens who sought to petition for the proposal of a constitutional amendment would have needed to collect at least five percent of signatures from voters in the previous gubernatorial race, and furthermore, that proportion of signatures would have had to come from all eighty-eight Ohio counties. Currently, a constitutional amendment can be elevated for consideration with the signatures of five percent of the voters in just forty-four of the eighty-eight counties.

But Issue One also sought to affect voter rights in an even more direct way, by proposing the elimination of current legislation that permits any voter whose signature has been deemed questionable by the office of the secretary of state to provide a signature-correction within a ten-day period after his or her ballot has been challenged. In other words, had the proposal passed, the secretary of state could have arbitrarily challenged ballot signatures and thrown the votes out without the voters’ having any recourse under the law. Considering the currently uncertain climate in which we have seen Republican attempts to steal an election through fraud on a national scale, this would have placed extraordinary authoritarian power in the hands of the secretary of state and, indeed, the state itself.

Although the referendum may have appeared, at first glance, to separate greater amendment restrictions from the abortion issue, they were, in fact, inextricably linked. Last year, Ohio’s legislature enacted one of the country’s most restrictive bans on abortion. Strong opposition to it, however, has kept that legislation from taking effect, since the Ohio Supreme Court agree to place it under judicial review. In the meantime, Ohio pro-choice activists have mounted a campaign to draft an amendment that would protect women’s reproductive rights.

Across the country, ever since the heavily conservative US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, which had protected these rights for fifty years—despite data demonstrating that a vast majority of Americans across party lines are, to a greater or lesser degree, pro-choice and were against the end of Roe-v Wade—grass-roots efforts to protect pro-choice rights at a state level have been put together across the country. The result has been six successful proposals to protect reproductive rights in as many states since Roe v Wade was dismantled.

This fact has thrown the Ohio GOP—which is clearly playing to the radicalized base of Donald Trump, despite all indications that the majority of voters oppose a flat ban on abortion—into panic mode. In spite of conservative attempts to sell Issue One as “protecting the constitution”, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose pulled no punches prior to the vote when he said that the referendum was “one hundred percent about keeping a radical, pro-abortion amendment out of our Constitution.”  Considering, as mentioned previously, that only about one in three amendments pass with a sixty percent majority, this tended to indicate that Issue One was less about constitutional integrity than about the GOP’s trying to appease the Trump evangelical base by keeping a pro-choice amendment from finding its way into law.

In the end, the inordinate stress that the Ohio GOP is placing on stripping women of their right to choose, and virtually making their wombs wards of the state, under the scrutiny and control government, may well be a very risky bet. The rejection of Issue One is clearly a strong indicator that this is true, especially in highly populated areas of the state, which Republicans can’t help but covet in their future election campaigns.

The numbers tell the story. Twice as many people voted in the referendum as in Ohio’s last primary. Overall, the measure was defeated by fifty-seven percent. In all major cities in the state, however, Issue One was spectacularly rejected by margins of between sixty-one and seventy-six percent.

Perhaps the Ohio GOP would be smart to stop tuning their discourse to the Trump base, rethink making abortion a major plank in their campaign and start concentrating on more practical issues.