For the third time in a little more than a year, Secretary of State Frank LaRose is in court over ballot language he and other Republicans wrote describing a measure they oppose.
This time, LaRose is getting sued over language the GOP-controlled Ohio Ballot Board approved last Friday describing a redistricting reform amendment voters will decide in November.
The campaign backing the amendment, Citizens Not Politicians, has accused LaRose of writing an illegally inaccurate, misleading ballot language designed to persuade voters to vote no. The group’s lawsuit asks the Republican-controlled Ohio Supreme Court to order the ballot board to rewrite the language, similar to two lawsuits last year over LaRose-backed ballot language for high-profile amendments in August and November.
The summary doesn’t change the amendment’s effects. But research has shown ballot summaries can play a major role in influencing the vote.
Controversy and even lawsuits over ballot issue language in Ohio are nothing new. But lawsuits used to be relatively rare. The burst of ballot issue litigation since 2023 shows how the ballot board, which originally was formed to provide voters with neutral, factual ballot information, has evolved as politics have become more partisan and as Ohio has become less politically competitive.
Ballot issues, meanwhile, have become a major political battleground in Ohio as left-leaning groups have turned to them to bypass the Republican-controlled legislature here to get policies directly before voters. Two major examples came least year, when Ohioans approved a citizen-initiated amendment in November to add abortion rights to the state constitution while defeating an August measure from state Republicans that would have blocked it.
Mike Curtin, who started covering the Ballot Board in the 1980s as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch before later becoming an editor and then a Democratic state lawmaker, said the panel under LaRose’s leadership has strayed from its essentially nonpartisan roots.
Curtin said that LaRose’s predecessor as Secretary of State, now-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, at least sought to get bipartisan consensus on ballot language, something he said LaRose hasn’t done.
“We live in a hyper-partisan time. The levers of power are being weaponized,” said Curtin, who supports the redistricting reform amendment. “Things that were battlegrounds before are battlegrounds now.”
LaRose and other Republicans have said their summary accurately reflects the redistricting reform amendment, which would put a citizen’s commission in charge of drawing Ohio’s congressional and state legislative district lines while taking that power away from a Republican-controlled panel of elected officials. Elected officials, lobbyists and other politicos, as well as their family members, would be barred from being members.
Dan Lusheck, a LaRose spokesperson, said the ballot language for the redistricting amendment is drawn from people on both sides of the debate, as well as the amendment itself, which he encouraged Ohioans to read it in its entirety online.
“This is really nothing more than finger-wagging by partisan operatives who wanted the Ballot Board to favor their own agenda,” Lusheck said in an email.
LaRose, however, previously has publicly acknowledged that political calculations play a role in the ballot issue language he has crafted. Last year, he said anti-abortion groups helped write the ballot language for the November abortion-rights amendment in a manner meant to help defeat it, although it still passed easily.
What is the Ohio Ballot Board?
The Ohio Ballot Board has existed since 1974, when voters overwhelmingly approved it via a constitutional amendment proposed by state lawmakers. One of its main jobs is to write ballot issue summaries. It also helps draft arguments for and against each proposed amendment, which are circulated publicly, including through state newspapers.
The reform was meant to give voters a better understanding of the ballot issues they were asked to consider. Before that, proposed amendments often would appear on the ballot in their entirety, resulting in voters being asked to interpret lengthy, highly technical legal jargon.
The Ballot Board initially only summarized amendments proposed by the state legislature. But in 1978, voters expanded them to apply to citizen-initiated amendments. The proposal was so uncontroversial that no group came forward to write opposing arguments.
Under state law, the Ballot Board has five members – the Secretary of State, two Republicans – currently state Sen. Theresa Gavarone and retired lobbyist William Morgan – and two Democrats – currently state Sen. Paula Hicks-Hudson and state Rep. Terrence Upchurch.
How has ballot language been argued over in the past?
State law requires ballot language to be factual, complete and unbiased. But that hasn’t taken politics out of the process. There’s often a push and pull over how long to make an amendment summary — simpler summaries are believed to be more likely to be approved.
But more commonly, debate and legal squabbling simply comes down to what words to include or exclude.
For example, in 1990, backers of an amendment that would open a casino in Lorain asked for the Ballot Board to include language referencing “gambling” and describing how the project would be evaluated to determine the project’s tourism and economic impact.
The ballot language instead described “games of chance” and had no reference to the project’s economic potential. Polls by the Columbus Dispatch suggested the wording change caused the measure, which eventually failed, to lose significant support.
In the 1990s, then-Gov. George Voinovich’s administration successfully pushed the Ballot Board to exclude the word “borrowing” or “debt” in descriptions of bond measures that authorized the state to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars for infrastructure projects. The proposals weren’t controversial, but coverage from The Plain Dealer described the phrasing as designed to help them pass.
An early major lawsuit came in 1981, when the Ohio Supreme Court ordered the Ballot Board to rewrite language for a measure that would allow private insurance companies to offer workers compensation policies in competition with the state’s government-run system. The decision said the original version was biased against the insurance industry. The amendment still was defeated overwhelmingly.
A more limited one came in 2012, when the Ohio Supreme Court ordered changes to ballot language for a redistricting-reform amendment that’s similar to the current one. The ruling said the original ballot description, written while Husted was Secretary of State, omitted relevant information, including about the criteria the new districts must follow, while misstating how the proposed new redistricting commission would be funded. Voters ultimately rejected the amendment by a nearly two-to-one margin.
Another limited case came in 2015, when the court ordered changes to the wording of a marijuana-legalization amendment. It rejected some revisions requested by the amendment backers, such as keeping the word “monopoly” in the measure’s title while referring to recreational marijuana use as “nonmedicinal” and not “personal” use. But it also said the original language inaccurately described some aspects, including the locations of marijuana growing and retail locations. Voters rejected the measure overwhelmingly.
Last year, the Ohio Supreme Court, under its current lineup, ordered the LaRose-led Ballot Board to rewrite the ballot wording for both the August amendment and the November abortion-rights amendment.
For the August amendment, which would have made it harder to pass future changes to the state constitution, the court ruled that LaRose made a factual error in describing the amendment’s tougher signature-gathering requirement for qualifying for the ballot. It also ordered a single word “any” be removed from the measure’s title. But the court, in a 4-3 decision, rejected more sweeping changes sought by the amendment’s backers.
For the November amendment, the court ordered the Ballot Board to remove a reference to the measure limiting “citizens of the state” from burdening or preventing someone from getting an abortion. The court said the phrasing made it sound like the prohibition would apply to private citizens, when it actually applied to the state government.
But the court broadly left the measure intact, including containing the term “unborn child” rather than the amendment backers’ preferred term, “fetus.”
More about the current lawsuit
The lawsuit against the current redistricting amendment, filed earlier this week, faults the ballot language in numerous ways. Among their problems: the current ballot language describes how the amendment would require the citizen’s redistricting commission to “gerrymander” districts in favor of Republicans or Democrats, while the measure’s backers describe the amendment as an anti-gerrymandering reform.
Amendment backers also take issue with how the language describes the commission as being majority-controlled by members of state’s two largest political parties. The description doesn’t specify that the amendment requires the new redistricting commission to have 15 members – five Republicans, five Democrats and five independents, or how any decision must be approved by at least two members from each group.
The Ohio Supreme Court has yet to formally take up the lawsuit, which was filed on Monday.
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