This is Pastor Tim’s article that appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, July 25
For those of you who may not know, we are going to the Ballot Box on August 8. I went to the Board of Elections website and downloaded a sample ballot and it appears it has only one issue on it. You have probably seen signs around telling you to vote for or against it. Today, I want to tell you what it is.
I am going to have a hard time influencing you on this because I am not sure what the motivation was behind it. In a nutshell, passing this issue will make getting amendments to the constitution much more difficult. I see pluses and minuses to that. But before I comment on how this might play out, let me explain to you exactly what the proposal does.
There are three parts. The first part extends the percentage of votes needed to adopt the amendment. Currently, a constitutional amendment needs simple majority to be adopted. That means a change can be adopted by getting 50% + 1 to become part of our constitution. This amendment will make it 60%. That means an extra 10% of the people will need to approve an amendment in order for the change to be adopted.
The second part of the amendment will address how amendments get on the ballot. There used to be a number of required signatures to get an amendment considered. Under this change, those signatures must come from all 88 counties in Ohio. 5% of voters in each county must sign the petition. What that would prevent is a group of voters from the more densely populated counties like Franklin or Cuyahoga from filling up the signatures without counties like Auglaize ever getting considered. Auglaize county could keep an amendment off the ballot the very same as Cuyahoga could simply by not having 5% of the population of that county sign the petition. This would force amendments to be supported statewide to get on the ballot.
The third part of the issue on the ballot states that January 1,2024 is the cut off date for submitting signatures under the old system should this amendment be adopted. Whatever proposed amendments that are submitted before the end of this year will be considered under the old rules regardless of the outcome of this vote.
Whatever side you come down on this vote is going to be determined by how easy or difficult you want the process to amend the state constitution to be. Passing this amendment will make it significantly more difficult in the future to make any changes to constitution because it will require more broad range of signatures from across the state to get it on the ballot and then it will require a far higher percentage of the vote to pass.
On the surface, I am inclined to say that making it more difficult to change the constitution is good because it should require a higher standard to make those kind of changes. But the potential downside to making it so difficult to amend the constitution means that we will see more change by executive order. Meaning that changes will be made that are never voted on. The more rigid a document the constitution is, the more likely it will be broken.
The constitution was always meant to be amended to keep it up with the times. The constitution of the State of Ohio was written in 1802 and ratified in 1803. Think about how many things have changed since then. What would a document written in 1803 to govern the land have to say about cars, interstate highways, railways, airplanes, or even the internet? None of those things were dreamed of in 1802 and our constitution has needed to keep pace with the state of the world. I am not saying that the purpose of the constitution needs to be changed, but just like churches now have electric lights, projection screens and air conditioning, the way we govern ourselves needs to address relevant issues of our time.
This is why there was a process to amend the constitution in the 1803 draft. Issue one makes it far more difficult to amend the constitution. Where do we balance the risk of radical change with the need for maintaining relevancy? That is what is going to be decided in this vote.