BAN:

On May 29, the Sixth Circuit issued an opinion in Brown v Yost, 24-3354, that is protective of the ability of people to use the initiative process in Ohio.  The Ohio law does not permit a statewide initiative to circulate until the proponents collect 1,000 signatures and submit their proposed initiative and a summary to the Attorney General.  If the Attorney General agrees that the summary is fair, he or she then send it on the Ohio Ballot Board, which then sends it on to the Secretary of State.  Only then can the group start to collect the signatures.  This year 413,000 signatures are needed, and the due date is July 3.

The group that filed the lawsuit has been trying to get started since last year, but the Attorney General has rejected their proposed summary six times.  The Sixth Circuit ordered the Attorney General to send the paperwork to the Ohio Ballot Board, a process that should be quick and should let the group finally start to get its signatures.  The measure would abolish qualified immunity for police officers.  The decision was 2-1.  Here is the Opinion.  It is by Judge Karen Nelson Moore, a Clinton appointee, and is also signed by Judge Andre Mathis, a Biden appointee.  The dissent is by Judge John K. Bush, a Trump appointee.

Cleveland.com:

Citizens behind an effort to abolish “qualified immunity” – a legal doctrine that can shield police from liability amid accusations of excessive use of force – are suing Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, alleging he’s illegally blocking them from moving toward placing the issue on the ballot.

Since February 2023, backers of the “Protecting Ohioans’ Constitutional Rights” initiative have submitted their proposed state constitutional amendment and summary language five times to Yost’s office. Yost, who’s only tasked to ensure the summary language accurately describes the amendment, has rejected their filings every time, most recently on March 14.

Irritated with what they say are baseless denials, they asked the Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday to force Yost to grant their petition, which they say truthfully and accurately represents the constitutional amendment they’re proposing. The litany of “incorrect and unfounded” objections Yost raised “suggests there are no circumstances under which” he will fulfill his legal duty. Rather, they argue, he’s trying to stall them by running out a clock– such amendments require submission of hundreds of thousands of valid signatures by July 3 to make the November ballot.

Their lawsuit lists a series of technical and legalistic edits they made to hew to Yost’s objections, an editing process that proved fruitless.

“We did everything he told us to do, and then he came up with four new ones,” said Mark Brown, a professor of constitutional law at Capital University who’s representing the organizers, in an interview. “We just got fed up.”

AP:

Legislative efforts in Missouri and Mississippi are attempting to prevent voters from having a say over abortion rights, building on anti-abortion strategies seen in other states, including last year in Ohio.

Democrats and abortion rights advocates say the efforts are evidence that Republican lawmakers and abortion opponents are trying to undercut democratic processes meant to give voters a direct role in forming state laws.

Derek Clinger:

The past year saw a continued trend of increased interest in direct democracy, with the highest number of statewide ballot measures for an odd-numbered election year in over 15 years. These measures, which came from both state legislatures and citizen-led initiative campaigns, addressed an array of subjects ranging from reproductive rights to religious rights, public utilities to public benefits, and taxation to timber production.

Many of the measures decided also involved matters related to democracy. These measures presented voters with essential questions like who can vote, how elections should be run, and whether to restrict their own ability to engage in direct democracy in the future. The particulars of the measures varied, as did the voters’ responses. And with the coming presidential election cycle in 2024, voters can expect to see even more of these types of ballot measures in the coming year.

This explainer recaps 2023’s democracy-related ballot measures, exploring the legal and political context in which they were proposed, as well as some of the arguments offered for and against them. It then looks ahead to the democracy-related measures that may appear on the ballot during the pivotal 2024 presidential election cycle….

Columbus Dispatch:

Issue 1 was projected to fail on Tuesday, according to Decision Desk HQ, dealing a blow to Ohio Republicans who wanted to hamstring a November ballot question on abortion rights.

Decision Desk HQ, an election results reporting agency providing results and race calls for the USA TODAY Network Ohio, called the race around 8:09 p.m. With about 28% of the vote counted, no vote was leading 68% to 32%.

Tuesday’s election was the culmination of a months-long fight that began last year, when Secretary of State Frank LaRose and Rep. Brian Stewart, R-Ashville, first introduced a plan to tighten the rules for constitutional amendments. The debate played out in the halls of the Ohio Statehouse, on the campaign trail and even in the courtroom as opponents tried to stop GOP lawmakers in their tracks.

Proponents of the measure said they want to keep controversial policies out of the constitution and reserve it for the state’s fundamental rights and values. Critics argued the ballot measure was a power grab that would hamstring the rights of citizens to place an issue on the ballot….

Republicans made it clear that they wanted to hold the election before November, when Ohioans will decide whether to enshrine reproductive rights in the constitution. That turned Tuesday’s election into a nationally watched proxy war over the abortion debate, as Ohio is the only state voting on the issue in 2023.

Even with such high stakes, convincing Ohioans to pay attention to a convoluted political issue in the summer cost both sides millions of dollars

Murray and Shaw NYT Oped:

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court justified its decision overruling Roe with an appeal to democracy. In the Dobbs majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the conclusion in Roe that the Constitution protected the right to abortion had stripped the American people of “the power to address a question of profound moral and social importance.” On this logic, the Dobbs decision merely corrected an egregious error, returning the power to regulate abortion “to the people and their elected representatives.”

Despite this paean to democracy, in the past year, elected officials in a number of states have demonstrated a disturbing hostility toward democracy when it is used to protect abortion rights and reproductive freedom. In that time, more than a dozen states have banned abortion, through the enforcement of pre-Roe abortion bans or the enactment of new ones. In other states, abortion access has been severely limited.

But one important countervailing trend in the post-Dobbs era has been the use of direct democracy to protect abortion rights. The mechanisms of direct democracy — referendums, initiatives, ballot questions and the like — allow voters to register their preferences directly, bypassing elected officials and other intermediaries.

These vehicles have proved remarkably effective. Since the fall of Roe, every time Americans have gone to the polls to vote directly on matters of abortion, they have voted to protect reproductive rights, expanding protections for abortion access and rejecting efforts to roll back access to abortion.

Perhaps that is why many Republican officials — many who once celebrated Dobbs and the prospect of democratic deliberation — are now laboring mightily to restrict access to direct democracy.

Supporters of reproductive freedom across the country must continue to flock to the polls to defeat efforts to throttle democratic processes where they are being used to limit democratic deliberation on abortion.

Nowhere is this imperative more pressing than in Ohio, where one of the most brazen attempts of this kind is underway. There, elected officials are seeking to erect obstacles to amending the state Constitution, almost certainly to prevent Ohio voters from enshrining reproductive freedom in that state’s charter.

See this complaint (via Martin Austermuhle).