Technically, August special elections are supposed to be illegal in Ohio. Late last year, a Republican-backed bill passed the state house prohibiting most special elections in August, reasoning that timing an election in the dog days of late summer depressed turnout, and cost too much money. But those same Republicans changed their tune in May, when it became clear that abortion rights supporters in Ohio would be able to put a ballot measure to voters securing abortion rights in the state in the November 2023 election. Ohio has a six-week ban on the books, but it is currently blocked by a court, and abortion remains legal up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. The measure, if passed, would help keep it that way, amending the Ohio state constitution to grant individuals a right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions”.
Ballot measures have been extremely successful tools of the pro-choice movement since the supreme court abolished the federal abortion right last year in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health: pro-choice ballot initiatives passed by surprisingly large margins even in Ohio’s heavily Republican neighbor state, Kentucky, as well as the similarly deep-red Kansas. Since Dobbs, every single time abortion rights have been put to the voters, they have prevailed. And so suddenly, the Ohio GOP felt that it was important that a vote be held in August: a vote, that is, to curtail the power of voting.
Ohio voters head to the polls on Tuesday to vote on Issue 1, the Republicans’ response to the November constitutional amendment. The sole question posed to voters in the August special election is a direct attempt to stop the legalization of abortion through democratic means: if passed, Issue 1 would make it more difficult for a ballot initiative to be brought to Ohio voters, and more difficult to pass one that was. The rule change would require advocates to collect signatures in all Ohio counties before a proposal could be placed on the ballot – a procedure that would give disproportionate power to rural, conservative parts of the state – and raise the threshold for passage from 50% to 60%. Currently, the pro-choice ballot initiative slated to go before Ohio voters in November polls at about 58% approval.
And so the fight over abortion rights and Issue 1 in Ohio has become a proxy for the broader fight many Republicans are waging across the states: when voters don’t like the party’s proposed policies – and overwhelmingly, voters do not like abortion bans – then instead of changing their platforms or setting out to persuade the electorate to change their minds, Republicans simply change the rules, so that the voters’ wishes don’t get in the way of their preferred policy outcomes. Don’t want to vote for the Republican party line? Then state Republicans will make sure that your vote doesn’t matter.
The Issue 1 special election is just the latest in a string of efforts by state Republican parties to curtail access to ballot measures. In Missouri, a court ruled that a ballot initiative seeking to legalize abortion could be presented on the 2024 ballot, even though the Republican attorney general there, Andrew Bailey, had tried to stonewall the effort by falsely claiming that the vote would cost the state a gargantuan amount of money. But state Republicans there had already pushed another measure through the state house, requiring ballot initiatives to receive at least 57% of the vote to pass. Like in Ohio, Missouri was unable to keep the abortion rights measure off the ballot. But just as Ohio Republicans are doing, the Missouri GOP tried to rig the process, explicitly to lessen the pro-choice side’s chances. The measure failed in the Missouri state senate, but Republicans there have vowed to try again. Republicans in at least nine other states – Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Maine, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Utah – have also tried to make it harder for ballot initiatives to pass, at least when those initiatives support abortion rights.
Abortion is not the only issue where Republicans have sought to curtail access to direct democracy in order to protect their policy goals. In South Dakota, an effort last year to raise the ballot initiative passage threshold to 60% was aimed mostly at stopping Medicaid expansion in the state. (It failed.)
But abortion has long been the issue around which America’s anti-democratic forces are most determined and inventive. In Texas, for instance, Republican politicians have responded to local prosecutors in large, Democratic-leaning cities like Houston who say they will not prosecute abortion cases by passing a bill allowing those prosecutors to be removed for “misconduct”. Similar bills aiming to curtail the authority of elected district attorneys over whether or not to enforce criminal abortion bans have also been brought forward by Republicans in Georgia, Indiana and South Carolina. Like the limits on ballot initiatives, the limits on the discretion of local DA’s also aim to end the ability of public opinion to influence policy outcome. If you don’t want to vote for the Republican policy, the Republicans will make sure your vote doesn’t matter; and if you vote in an official who will pursue a different policy, the Republicans will make sure that official loses the authority to do her job.
Maybe it’s appropriate that Republicans have made the anti-abortion crusade the focus of so much of their anti-democracy efforts. Abortion bans, after all, are substantively anti-democratic. They are unpopular, yes, imposed by the unelected supreme court. But more importantly they are an insult to citizenship, depriving half of Americans the ability to live their lives with freedom, dignity, bodily integrity and self-determination – preconditions to any meaningful, equal status as citizens. It makes sense that Republicans would embark on sneaky, procedural efforts to undermine abortion in pursuit of this same project. They don’t want to allow women to live as full, equal citizens. But really, they don’t especially want that for anyone else, either. In justifying his decision to overturn Roe v Wade, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, wrote that if women didn’t like what he was doing to them, they could just vote. “Women are not without political power,” he wrote. At least, the Republican ones aren’t.
