COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Among state supreme courts, the Ohio Supreme Court ranks somewhere between undistinguished and disreputable. The court is uninterested in judicial scholarship, indifferent to precedent and lustful for partisanship. Those traits were on parade earlier this month, when majority Republicans, in a 4-3 power play , effectively decreed the Ohio Ballot Board is free to mislead voters and has no obligation to be impartial.
The ruling undermines at least seven decades of legislative and judicial efforts to ensure fairness on ballot questions. For the first time in Ohio history, the state’s highest court put a stamp of approval on ballot language intentionally written to defeat a statewide issue. How did we get here? In 1953, a strongly Republican state legislature passed and Democratic Gov.
Frank J. Lausche signed a law to guarantee the fairness of ballot titles. The law requires the secretary of state and Ohio’s 88 county boards of elections to provide “a true and impartial statement of the measures in such language that the ballot title shall not be likely to create prejudice for or against the measure.
” In 1974, Ohioans overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment designed to provide additional ballot clarity, beyond ballot titles. The amendment created the five-member ballot board and empowered it to prepare ballot language explaining proposed constitutional amendments. Previously, after reading the title, voters had to read the entire text or.
