The contest was seen as a test of efforts by Republicans nationwide to curb voters’ use of ballot initiatives.
Ohio voters rejected a bid on Tuesday to make it harder to amend the State Constitution, according to The Associated Press, a significant victory for abortion-rights supporters trying to stop the Republican-controlled State Legislature from severely restricting the procedure.
The abortion question turned what would normally be a sleepy summer election in an off year into a highly visible dogfight that took on national importance and drew an unprecedented number of Ohio voters for an August election.
Late results showed the measure losing by 13 percentage points, 56.5 percent to 43.5 percent. The roughly 2.8 million votes cast dwarfed the 1.66 million ballots counted in the state’s 2022 primary elections, in which races for governor, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House were up for grabs.
The contest was widely seen as a test of Republicans’ efforts nationwide to curb the use of ballot initiatives, and a potential barometer of the political climate going into the 2024 elections.
Organizations that opposed the proposal called the vote a decisive rebuff of the State Legislature, which had ordered the referendum in an attempt to derail a November vote on a constitutional amendment that would guarantee abortion rights.
“It was about a direct connection with the abortion issue for many voters,” said Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, one of the leaders of the Ohio campaign against the proposal. “But there were many others who saw it as a power grab by some legislators.
“The resounding rejection of their attempt means that voters know what’s up when they’re being asked to vote their rights away.”
The ballot measure would have required that amendments to the State Constitution gain approval by 60 percent of voters, up substantially from the current requirement of a simple majority. Republicans initially pitched that as an attempt to keep wealthy special interests from hijacking the amendment process for their own gain. The lawmakers voted largely along party lines in May to put the proposal on the ballot.
But from the start, that reasoning was overtaken by weightier arguments, led by — but hardly confined to — the abortion debate.
The Ohio Legislature passed some of the nation’s strictest curbs on abortion last year, banning the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Ohio Supreme Court is considering the constitutionality of those curbs, but the law’s passage drove a successful grass-roots campaign this year to place an abortion-rights amendment on the November ballot.
That amendment would upend the new law by giving women legal control over reproductive decisions, allowing doctors to make medical judgments on the need for abortions, and restricting the state to regulating abortions only after a fetus is judged viable.
Raising the threshold for adopting an amendment to 60 percent of votes would have put the fate of the proposed amendment in greater doubt. In two polls, 58 percent and 59 percent of respondents supported granting a constitutional right to abortion access…….