COLUMBUS, Ohio – Ohio would set some of the highest hurdles for citizen-initiated state constitutional amendments in the country if voters pass State Issue 1 this August.

The highest profile part of State Issue 1 would increase, from 50% to 60%, the percentage of state voters who would have to vote “yes” to pass future proposed amendments. The measure, if voters approve it in August, would have profound implications for a potential abortion-rights amendment in November. That’s why Republicans fast-tracked it last month, and why that part of the measure has gotten the most media attention.

But the proposal also would weed out potential citizen-initiated amendments by making it much harder for them to qualify for the ballot in the first place. This would be done by requiring amendment campaigns, starting in 2024, to first gather a minimum number of voter signatures from all 88 Ohio counties, compared to 44 counties now.

It also would eliminate a 10-day “cure period” during which amendment campaigns can collect additional signatures if their first batch falls short.

Read more: Coverage of State Issue 1

The new signature requirements would erect one of the biggest roadblocks in the country for citizens who want to change their state constitutions. Some critics say it would make it a near impossible task to qualify for the ballot, much less win 60% of the vote.

“They’re describing this as just another hurdle for amendment campaigns,” said Gabriel Mann, a spokesperson for Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom, one of the campaign groups behind the potential abortion-rights ballot initiative in November. “But in actuality for Ohioans, this will take the option completely off the table.”

However, others say it would just make the process more expensive and laborious – but not unattainable.

“While nothing is impossible, the new geographic signature requirements create monumental hurdles including increased costs for citizen led campaigns and creating a system that advantages only the most well-resourced special interests,” said Sarah Walker, legal and policy director for the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a progressive group that’s advanced left-leaning ballot initiatives across the country. “If the stated purpose of Issue 1 was to limit the influence of outside special interests on the Ohio Constitution, these onerous geographic signature requirements do precisely the opposite.”

John Dinan, a Wake Forest University professor and expert on state constitutional amendments, said geographic-based petition restrictions are a common way that states set limits on amendment campaigns.

Most states set them by congressional or legislative district. As of January of this year, two states, Colorado and Nevada, require that they come from each district. Three states set them by county, including Ohio. None of the three currently require that signatures come from 100% of the counties.

And while Ohio has 88 counties, Nevada has four congressional districts and Colorado has 35 state senate districts.

“Ohio’s current requirement that a certain amount of signatures be collected in half of the state’s counties is more in keeping with what other states require,” Dinan said. “An 88-county requirement would be at the clear upper end of what states require in terms of a geographical distribution requirement for signature collection.”

However, State Issue 1 also would leave intact Ohio’s statewide requirement that campaigns collect a number of signatures equal to 10% of the most recent election for governor, or around 441,000 this year.

That part of the requirement keeps Ohio “in the broad middle” of what states require in terms of overall signature numbers, according to Dinan.

An election will be held on Aug. 8 to decide the issue. A “yes” vote would approve the changes while a “no” vote would reject them.

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What would a tougher requirement do?

Dinan has tracked and studied state constitutional amendment processes for years, including the recent move by Republican-controlled states to limit them in response to progressive victories at the ballot box. He’s even written a book on the subject.

But, he said he hasn’t seen any research into whether tougher ballot access requirements have any effect on the number of amendment proposals that eventually make it through, though he assumes they at least require campaigns to expend greater resources.

“Moving from 50% to 60% for the ratification threshold clearly makes it more difficult to pass measures,” he said. “But I don’t think we can say for sure that states with more stringent geographic distribution requirements see fewer successful ballot measures.”

Steve Stivers, the CEO of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce said in an interview last month that the proposal is meant to filter out “less serious” proposals.

“The key for us is to avoid having these things on the ballot,” said Stivers, a former Republican congressman from the Columbus area. “We make sure they’re serious, because what makes it on the ballot, our members end up holding the bag, paying for the campaigns for or against these issues.”

Some critics contend State Issue 1 though would effectively neuter the citizen-proposed constitutional amendment process. Between the 88-county requirement and the end of the “cure” period, it would mean a campaign could fail if it were to fall a single signature short in a single county.

Mann, the official from the campaign group working on the November abortion-rights ballot issue, said the new requirements would be infeasible for a campaign group to meet.

He also said they could have a chilling effect, leading outside petition firms to pass on working in Ohio altogether. The abortion-rights ballot campaign, Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom, has hired Advanced Microtargeting, one of a handful of top national firms that specialize in petition gathering for ballot campaigns, to help them qualify for the ballot ahead of a deadline in early July.

“If the new requirement were that we have to get signatures from all 88 counties, these experts who do this work are going to look at Ohio and say, ‘Sorry, that’s not something we can handle,’” Mann said.

One Ohio political operative with experience in ballot campaigns, though, said citizen-initiated amendment campaigns still would be possible under State Issue 1.

But, the operative said, they would be even more expensive.

The current going rate is $20 to $25 per signature if a campaign hires a paid petitioning firm, something that’s increasingly common, said the operative, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

“So, qualifying a constitutional amendment in Ohio already costs between $8 and $10 million. Doubling the county requirement to 88 will add about $1 million to that total,” the operative said.

In practical terms though, collecting signatures in more rural areas will present unique challenges to gathering signatures. Some of Ohio’s more rural areas lack large gathering places, like a shopping mall, requiring a greater effort from canvassers to find voters.

“While the total number for some of these little counties are small, you literally have to go door-to-door to do it, so it is very labor intensive,” the operative said.

Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who has been a driving force behind State Issue 1, has said expanding the signature requirements only will advantage deep-pocketed ballot campaigns at the expense of more grassroots, citizen-backed effort.

That was before the proposal included the tougher signature-gathering requirements, though.

During a November news conference unveiling the first version of what became State Issue 1, LaRose called changing the signature threshold a “pretty blunt instrument.”

“Because if you were to raise the signature threshold, that would make it effectively harder for Ohioans to put an issue on the ballot. And that would disadvantage those truly citizen groups that want to get out there with clipboards and make it happen….You may actually comparatively advantage the special interests because the special interests may be able to afford to pay $1 million, the $1.5 million, to hire more people with clipboards,” LaRose said.

LaRose has spoken publicly in favor of the measure since its drafters added the higher signature requirements.

“The Secretary strongly feels changes in something as significant as our state constitution should require a broad and bipartisan consensus for approval,” said a spokesperson, Rob Nichols. “We believe the best way to do that is by increasing the threshold necessary for passage, consistent with a number of other states and the consensus required to amend the U.S. Constitution.”

How the signature gathering process works

Since 1913, the Ohio Constitution has allowed citizen groups to propose amendments to the state constitution. It’s become a popular vehicle for proposing direct law changes on topics ranging from raising the minimum wage to banning same-sex marriage to legalizing casino gambling.

Ohio has another process through which citizens can propose law changes called an initiated statute, but it’s possible for lawmakers to immediately repeal them. Constitutional amendments, on the other hand, only can be undone with another statewide vote.

That lawmakers can set aside the will of the voters in an initiated statute – something that has happened in other states – has made constitutional amendments a more attractive option for supporters looking to invest time and resources into a campaign.

Both procedures require campaigns to first get petition language approved, which can take weeks or months. Then, they must gather a minimum number of signatures – for constitutional amendments, it’s a number equal to 10% of the most recent election for governor – from voters in half of Ohio’s 88 counties.

Lawmakers included the 44-county requirement as a compromise between pro and anti-initiative factions when they developed the rules more than a century ago, according to a report from the Ohio Constitutional Revision Commission, which met in the 1970s. It was meant to address concerns from rural lawmakers that more populous counties would dominate the initiative process.

Because the 44-county rule in essence dilutes larger county residents’ ability to propose constitutional changes, some at times have raised concerns that the geographic-based requirement violates federal “one person, one vote” principles. There haven’t been any successful court challenges along these grounds in Ohio, although the Michigan Supreme Court last year overturned geographic signature requirements passed there by the Republican-controlled legislature in 2018, the same year voters approved several progressive proposals, including marijuana legalization, redistricting reform and an expansion of voting rights.

State Issue 1 backers have tended to focus on the part of State Issue 1 that raises the voter approval threshold from 50% to 60%.

But they’ve cast the new 88-county requirement as ensuring that Ohioans in all 88 counties have a voice when it comes to potential amendments to the state constitution. They’ve also generally said it should be harder to amend the state constitution, and that it shouldn’t be used as a way to enact routine policies that could be passed through the legislature.

“Let’s face it, people aren’t sitting around the table at bridge club coming up with ideas for constitutional amendment campaigns,” said Mike Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, an anti-abortion group that’s actively involved in the push to pass State Issue 1. “These are well-funded operations, often out of state, whether conservative or liberal, knowing they have to collect millions of signatures. This doesn’t change the game, it just makes sure everyone has a chance to have a voice in this.”

The 88-county requirement was a decisive factor in the Ohio Chamber of Commerce’s decision to endorse the measure, according to Stivers, the group’s CEO. Limiting ballot initiatives has been a longtime priority of the group, dating back at least to 2006, when state voters approved a citizen-proposed minimum wage increase amendment.

“If it was just the 60% [approval threshold], I’m not sure we would have taken the same position,” Stivers said at the time. “But with requiring the signatures in all 88 counties and doing away with the cure period… those were a big deal to the business community.”

How Ohio compares to other states

As of January, Ohio was one of 17 U.S. states that currently allow citizens to propose constitutional amendments, according to research that Dinan, the Wake Forest professor, compiled for the Council of State Governments, a nonpartisan trade group. Each state has its own rules, including how hard it is for amendments to qualify for the ballot.

There are two main bars states set for amendment campaigns. One is the overall number of signatures a campaign must collect, generally expressed as a percentage of the electorate. In Ohio, it’s 10%, with the number based on the number of voters in elections for governor, and that would stay the same under the amendment.

Some of the lower ends of the range are:

• Colorado, which requires amendment campaigns to get signatures equal to 5% of the most recent election for Secretary of State,
• California and Oregon, which requires amendment campaigns to get signatures equal to 8% of the most recent election for governor

Some of the states at the middle to higher end of the range are:

• Florida, which requires campaigns get signatures equal to 8% of the most recent election for president
• Arizona and Oklahoma, which require campaigns to get signatures equal to 15% of the most recent election for governor

The other limiting factor is geographic signature requirements, like Ohio’s 44-county requirement or the proposed 88-county bar in State Issue 1.

Some states don’t have geographic requirements at all, including Arizona, California, Oklahoma, Oregon and South Dakota. (That California’s ballot access rules are relatively loose – a lower signature requirement without a geographic requirement – are a likely factor why ballot campaigns have become so prevalent there.)

Most states with geographic signature requirements set them by state legislative or congressional district. The highest percentage requirement by geography are Colorado and Nevada, which each require they come from 100% of the states’ districts. For comparison, Florida requires signatures come from half its districts, and Nebraska requires them from 40% of its districts.

Three states – Arkansas, Nebraska and Ohio – require signatures to be collected from a certain number of counties. The highest requirement comes from Arkansas, where Republican legislators in March moved to require campaigns gather signatures from 50 of its 75 counties (66%), an increase from 15 counties.

The higher requirement in Arkansas is the subject of a lawsuit though, given that voters in Arkansas rejected a 2020 proposal to increase the county requirement, which state officials there said at the time required a constitutional amendment.

In Nebraska, amendment campaigns must collect signatures from 37 of the state’s 92 counties (40%.)

Ohio would be the only state that requires signatures from all of its 88 counties.

There’s one final way states try to restrict ballot initiative campaigns. They impose regulations on the people who gather the signatures.

Since 2005, Ohio has required paid petition gatherers to file forms with the state disclosing their employer, in a move proponents said would ensure transparency but which imposes an administrative burden on petition firms. In 2008, Ohio also moved the deadline to file citizen-initiated amendment petitions from 90 days before an election to 125 days before, giving campaigns less time to gather signatures.

Andrew Tobias covers state politics and government for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer