When people ask me about the biggest issues facing Ohio’s judiciary, I always answer, “politicization.” All you have to do is read about the Ohio’s Supreme Court’s most recent ruling on the ballot language of Issue 1 to understand why.
Secretary of State Frank LaRose opposes the Citizens Not Politicians ballot amendment – Issue 1 – that will reform how Ohio draws legislative districts and remove politicians from the process. Instead of presenting the ballot language in an unbiased, fact-based way as the law requires him to do, he and a majority of the members on the ballot board crafted language designed to scare voters into rejecting the ballot amendment by saying that Issue 1 will, among other things, encourage gerrymandering.
The Republican Party-supported members of the Supreme Court allowed most of LaRose’s language to stand.
I joined dissenting opinions by Justice Brunner and Justice Michael Donnelly to concur with the minor corrections the majority suggested, but we vigorously dissented with the crux of the ruling: allowing the state’s chief elections officer, the Secretary of State, to misrepresent Issue 1 in an attempt to deceive and mislead Ohio voters. The Ohio Constitution prohibits ballot language that is “in the nature of a persuasive argument in favor of or against the issue.”
All we need to do as justices is simply use common sense and apply that principle to the whole of the text submitted by the Ohio Ballot Board. Instead, the majority chose to cherry-pick words and ideas and interpret them without any context in order to arrive at the outcome their political party prefers.
Here is one of my favorite passages in Justice Donnelly’s dissent: “Given that the four members of this court in the majority today apparently think that the word ‘boneless’ means ‘you should expect bones,’…I’m sure it comes as no great surprise that they think that a constitutional amendment to ‘ban partisan gerrymandering’ means to “require[] gerrymander[ing].”
For many years, all judicial races in Ohio were nonpartisan in our general elections. But when the Supreme Court became more balanced with representation from both major political parties, the Republican political operatives and super majority in the Ohio legislature changed the law to require party affiliation on the ballot for some, but not all, judicial races in an effort to go back to an all one-party Ohio Supreme Court. Their hope? That the majority of voters won’t notice their constant political overreach, won’t pay attention to the judicial candidates’ credentials or experience, and that the majority of voters simply default to voting Republican as the state has trended this way over the last presidential election years.
I have a lot more faith in the voters of Ohio than that, but it will take a hard-fought campaign to overcome the obstacles extremist politicians have created. So please, consider getting involved. Click here for opportunities to help us protect common sense and the rule of law in Ohio, and to guard against extreme political overreach.
Sincerely,
Melody Stewart
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