The legal case against the Ohio Ballot Board over ballot language for Issue 1, the anti-gerrymandering amendment, took an unusual turn last week when two of the board members agreed with the allegations against them.
The allegations — that the Ballot Board adopted “biased and deceptive” language to describe Issue 1 to voters — were first laid out in a suit filed with the Ohio Supreme Court on Aug. 19 by Citizens Not Politicians (CNP), the organization that got Issue 1 on the ballot.
Issue 1 is intended to end gerrymandering in Ohio, the practice of drawing political district boundaries to benefit one party over another, by barring elected officials from the process. Gov. Mike DeWine and other state Republicans have spoken out against it.
The Ballot Board is made up of five members — three Republicans, including Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, and two Democrats. At an Aug. 16 board meeting, the Republicans outvoted the Democrats to adopt the allegedly deceptive language that will be printed on paper ballots for the November election.
On Aug. 28, the Democrats, state Sen. Paula Hicks-Hudson and state Rep. Terrence Upchurch, filed a brief renouncing that outcome.
“We have real concerns about the process by which the language was adopted,” they wrote, “and the truthfulness behind the Secretary of State’s honest and fair consideration of the language proposed by [CNP].”
Upchurch and Hicks-Hudson also said that Attorney General Dave Yost, who represents the Ballot Board in this case, never spoke to them before filing the response to CNP’s lawsuit. Yost’s office also denied their request for their own lawyers.
“It is absurd that the State’s Attorney General would file an answer to this honorable Court before notifying us that [he] would be denying our request for outside counsel representation,” they wrote. “This deliberate political maneuver is not only in contravention to prior precedent, but it exhibits our underlying assertion that a conflict of interest is present ….”
On Tuesday, Yost filed a motion asking the court to ignore Upchurch and Hicks-Hudson’s response to the lawsuit. He argued that allowing state officials who were on the losing side of a vote to challenge that vote in court “would subvert the democratic system.”
Update: On Sept. 3, the Ohio Supreme Court gave Hicks-Hudson, Upchurch and CNP’s attorneys until 3 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 6, to respond to Yost’s motion.