A federal judge in Cincinnati has ordered Ohio officials to allow state issue campaigns to collect the signatures needed to make the ballot electronically, granting a request from backers of two campaigns targeting the November election.
Ohioans for Raising the Wage, which wants to raise Ohio’s minimum wage to $13 an hour, and Ohioans for Secure and Fair Elections, backers of an effort to expand Ohio’s voting access laws, had laid out a plan for gathering electronic signatures. The campaigns proposed using the company DocuSign, which commonly is used to collect electronic signatures for mortgages and other documents, and collecting the last four digits of each voters’ social security number for verification.