The groups behind the effort to put abortion rights to a vote in Ohio this fall announced Wednesday that they’d officially turned in “over 700,000” signatures to get the proposal on the ballot.
I hope they are successful. This rush to subvert the will of the people by a vocal minority needs to stop.
People power can beat a repressive divisive would-be power monopoly. Find a group to help you phone bank into Ohio! Contact voters and urge them to vote!
“For those who wonder can this be done, can we defeat the anti-democracy efforts in August and can we pass this amendment in November, let me tell you something — this coalition has been up against the full force of the corrupt government in Columbus for a decade and we still have abortion access in every corner of the state,”
What is happening is that they are separating “abortion” from elections of state legislators and the elected executives to include the governor and AG.
I am not sure that is a good idea or not.
It seems to me the best way to defeat “anti-democratic efforts” and " the corrupt government in Columbus" is not to remove there power on a single issue but rather to remove their power on all issues by using the issue of reproductive rights to defeat the “corrupt government” and “anti-democratic efforts” when they are up for election. I mean when it comes to governors, AGs and other state wide offices, gerrymandering is not the problem.
Two really disturbing trends on display here
The first is state legislatures raising the bar to impossible heights for citizen initiatives. The innumerate American public have no idea how hard it is to get a 60% vote on anything. Arizona just passed a constitutional amendment to require a 60% vote for voters to pass ballot measures to approve taxes. This amendment was barely passed 50.72% to 49.28%, but no one apparently sees the complete irony in that.
Last year, Arizonans gathered almost 400,000 signatures to put a measure on the ballot reversing a lot of the voting suppression measures the AZ legislature had passed. Here is some of what transpired
Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and the GOP leaders of the House and Senate had urged the high court to reject all three measures. Ducey has appointed five of the seven justices.
Mikitish has presided over three weeks of hearings in a case filed by a pro-business group that challenged many of the nearly 400,000 signatures the initiative backers filed. After lawyers for the Arizona Free Enterprise Club succeeded in knocking off nearly 96,000 signatures, and a county review to determine if the signatures were valid kicked off nearly 64,000 more, it was left with just 2,281 more than the required 237,645 signatures needed to make the ballot.
In Friday, Mikitish flipped those numbers.
The Free and Fair Elections measure sought to change a slew of election laws. It would have specifically blocked the Legislature from overturning the results of presidential elections, an avenue some Republicans explored after former President Donald Trump’s loss in the state in 2020.
It also would have guaranteed ballot privacy and bars handing election materials or ballots over to outside groups like the state Senate did after 2020, expanded voting access, mandated that all voters can go to any polling site, extended early voting and limited lobbyists’ ability to wine and dine lawmakers.
The measure also would eliminate the “strict compliance” legal standard that led Mikitish to disqualify many of the petition sheets. The GOP-controlled Legislature required that standard for initiatives in 2017, making it easier to throw them out for relatively minor paperwork errors.
The Free Enterprise Club challenged tens of thousands of signatures, many for exceptionally minor issues.
For instance, 7,000 signatures were challenged because a volunteer petition circulator mistakenly checked a box that indicated they were paid circulators.
Still, with all that, it still required the AZ Supreme Court (expanded and packed by Ducey several years earlier) to just simply say throw it out. It will be interesting to see what happens in Ohio.
We got completely screwed here in AZ under the guise of legality and it continues to happen every day.
I’m a bit confused. The signature requirement has been met under currently existing law. The Ohio lege is attempting to change the rules with some weird ballot stunt in August. Shouldn’t the rule existing at the time of submission apply. Wouldn’t a changed rule be ex post facto?
But thank FSM for Katie Hobbs.
On April 18, Hobbs shattered the veto record set in 2005 by fellow Democrat Janet Napolitano. As of June 20, Hobbs had vetoed 143 bills — and the legislative session isn’t over yet.
If that loser Lake had won, all this drek from the twisted brains of that slim majority of fascists would have become law.
Good. Let’s hope the present SCOTUS conservative nutters don’t decide that people signing petitions don’t have standing because they’re interfering in the 1st Amendment rights of the ‘force women to have our babies’ misogynist crowd.
I believe that the current signature threshold will be used to determine if the issue is placed on the ballot in November. However, if Issue 1 passes in August, the 60% of the vote threshold will be used in November to determine if the Amendment is approved.
I was going to say to the folks in Ohio, GET MORE!
Your comment is why.
That’s still ex post facto. The signatures were collected under the law as it exists. The elected response should follow that law.
Not an either/or. Protect the rights as quickly as posible… Then go after statewide officials whio opposed those rights. Then go after specific targets in the legislatures.
You would think a vote requiring a vote to be 60% would have to be passed by 60%.
Every adoptive parent and their child should be eligible for Medicaid regardless of income.
Liberal states should be more aggressive about recruiting immigrants, before dixie gets too many more Congresspersons.
Was thinking similarly - that Roberts & the SC right wing would rule that “the people” had egregiously exceeded their authority…
Well, that makes at least 10,000 mothers and babies sh*t out of luck now that they are born. Here’s hoping at least some are now first generation Americans.
ETA: Please, TPM, don’t use the term “Pro-Abortion.” Pro-choice is what we want and we get enough crap from those on the other side who want to tar us with that term. Thank you.
Best to encourage the movement with a win in this limited, single issue fashion. Then the movement starts to realize that it can win, and more campaigns follow from that realization, with that much more self-aware strength.
Winning helps the winners beyond just the winning vote.