An effort to get a voting rights amendment on the ballot is on hold while organizers wait for the Ohio Supreme Court to weigh in on their dispute with state Attorney General Dave Yost.

The backers of a proposed state constitutional amendment, the Ohio Voters Bill of Rights, sued Yost on Feb. 1, days after he rejected their ballot summary language a second time. Securing approval of the ballot summary is an early step in a long process to get an amendment on the ballot.

The summary is what supporters of an amendment show to people when they’re gathering signatures on petitions, the next step in the process. That’s why state law requires that the summary be a “fair and truthful statement” about the effects of the proposed changes to the state constitution. The law also gives the attorney general sole discretion over determining that.

“The latest rejection of our proposed ballot summary from AG Yost’s office is nothing but a shameful abuse of power to stymie the right of Ohio citizens to propose amendments to the Ohio Constitution,” the amendment campaign organizers said in a statement. The campaign is run by a coalition led by the Ohio Unity Coalition, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, the Ohio NAACP and the A. Philip Randolph Institute.

The Ohio Voters Bill of Rights would allow citizens to register and vote on the same day; add school-issued photo identification cards to the list of acceptable forms of ID; and permit counties to extend early voting hours and use multiple drop boxes, among other changes.

Rejected twice

On Jan. 25, Yost wrote that the title of the amendment, the Ohio Voters Bill of Rights, “does not fairly or accurately summarize or describe the actual content of the proposed amendment.”

“It has become commonplace to use the language of advocacy and advertising in initiated statutes and constitutional amendments,” he wrote. “At least on the formal ballot, the language should be as neutral as possible. This office will take a skeptical view of such efforts in its reviews, regardless of which political tribe may be offering its proposal to the sovereign people.”

The title “is sufficient on its own to reject this petition,” Yost concluded. His office did not respond to a question from Signal Cleveland about whether there could be other grounds for rejection that he did not address because the title was sufficient grounds.

In December, Yost rejected the first version of the summary for various reasons, including the title, which at the time was Secure and Fair Elections.

In a Feb. 2 post on X (formerly Twitter), Yost seemed to welcome the lawsuit.

“We’ve been sued over this decision. Good,” he wrote. “The voters deserve a no-spin zone when asked to sign a petition, and I aim to give it to them.”

Is this even Yost’s call?

In their announcement of the lawsuit, the backers of the voting rights amendment argued that Yost was acting on “his subjective distaste” for the title and that he lacks the authority to rule on the matter.

“Indeed, proponents of a ballot measure are not required to include a title until a later stage of the petition process,” their attorneys wrote in the complaint filed with the Ohio Supreme Court. Yost may be the first attorney general to reject on the basis of a title, they added, based on their review of records on his web site.

The amendment coalition asked the Supreme Court for expedited review, but that request was denied. However, the coalition behind the amendment said they will move forward with the suit.

“We remain undeterred from working towards our ultimate north star goal to enshrine and protect the full power of our votes in our state constitution,” the coalition wrote.   

Voting rights: What happens next?

If the summary language is eventually approved, it will go next to the Ohio Ballot Board. The board’s role is to “evaluate the petition to ensure that it contains only one constitutional amendment,” according to the Ohio Secretary of State’s web site.

The board is made up of three Republicans and two Democrats. One of the Republicans is Secretary of State Frank LaRose. Last year, LaRose made significant and controversial changes to the summary of Issue 1, the constitutional amendment that ensured reproductive rights, including access to abortion. LaRose is a vocal opponent of abortion rights, and the changes he made had nothing to do with the number of amendments contained in the proposed language.

Still, the board voted along party lines to adopt LaRose’s edits.

LaRose is on record opposing the Ohio Voters Bill of Rights. In December he called the amendment “a direct assault on the integrity of our voting process” and described its backers as “radical interests” who want to “make elections easier to steal.”