The Abortion Fight Has Voters Turning to Ballot Initiatives
In 1910, Ohio voters went to the polls and called a convention to update the state’s constitution, which had been in place since 1851. It was the Progressive Era, and, two years later, a hundred and nineteen delegates—Republicans, Democrats, and a few Independents and Socialists, representing various professions from across the state—met in Columbus, where they advanced reforms reflecting the egalitarian tendencies of the time. Theodore Roosevelt, who had left the White House three years earlier, delivered a speech, lasting more than an hour, called “A Charter of Democracy,” in which he lamented that many state legislatures “have not been responsive to the popular will.” Their interests were often too narrow, he said, their approaches too often dismissive of the people they were elected to serve. The answer was access to more ballot initiatives, led by citizens, “not to destroy representative government, but to correct it whenever it becomes misrepresentative.”
The delegates drafted forty-two amendments, and, later that year, Ohio voters approved thirty-four of them. One abolished prison contract labor. Others mandated an eight-hour workday on government-funded projects, established a workers’-compensation system, created direct primary elections, and gave more authority to municipalities to run their own affairs. (Of course, only men voted, and one of the amendments they rejected, fifty-seven per cent to forty-three, would have granted women the franchise, eight years before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.) Significantly, Amendment 6 established a procedure for citizens to gather signatures to place a constitutional amendment directly on the ballot, avoiding the need for another constitutional convention. The number required was, and remains, ten per cent of the total who voted for governor in the prior election, spread across a certain number of counties. If a simple majority vote in favor, the amendment takes effect: “direct popular action,” as Roosevelt called it, containing reasonable barriers “to prevent its being wantonly or too frequently used.”
For more than a century, that’s how things stood. The procedure has certainly not been wantonly used. Since 1950, according to the state chapter of Common Cause, forty-three citizen initiatives to amend the constitution have appeared on a ballot. Voters passed just ten of them. Nevertheless, in recent months, the Republican majority in Ohio’s gerrymandered state legislature has decided that a simple majority is too low a threshold. Despite objections from a bipartisan array of former governors, attorneys general, and election workers, Republican legislators scheduled a rare special election for August 8th, during which they will ask voters to approve raising it to sixty per cent. The stated reason is to “safeguard Ohio’s constitution from special interests.” A more immediate reason, according to the effort’s main sponsor, State Representative Brian Stewart: “The Left intends to write abortion on demand into Ohio’s Constitution.”
The maneuvering in Ohio is a clear example—nearly a year after the Supreme Court, in Dobbs, overturned Roe v. Wade—of the recent, escalating effort by G.O.P.-controlled state legislatures to limit abortion access. In April, nineteen Republican attorneys general filed a brief in support of a Texas lawsuit seeking to take the abortion drug mifepristone off the market. In Idaho, where abortion is banned, with few exceptions, helping a minor travel out of state to obtain one without parental consent is now punishable with prison time. In Tennessee, performing an abortion is a felony in most circumstances, including in cases of rape or incest. Last month, after bitter legislative debate, Republican supermajorities established new restrictions in Nebraska, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
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