And the amendment’s text went even further to constrain Ohioans’ ability to amend the state constitution. Under the state’s current rules, a constitutional amendment has to gain a certain number of signatures from 44 Ohio counties. Issue 1 would have required an amendment’s supporters to get that number from all 88 counties in the state. It also blocked proponents from including “additional signatures” to a petition after it had been filed with the secretary of state’s office, meaning that an amendment’s backers wouldn’t be able to correct or replace challenged signatures. All those changes apparently dissuaded some small-c conservative voters from backing the amendment.
Some of the amendment’s supporters claimed the goal was to stop out-of-state interest groups from rewriting Ohio’s constitution, but others were not subtle about the amendment’s true purpose. “This is 100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, one of Issue 1’s champions, told reporters in June. “The left wants to jam it in there this coming November.” To that end, Republican state lawmakers fast-tracked it for an August 8 vote so it could take effect in time to block the November vote, a move that critics derided as cynical.
More than a few states have now moved to protect abortion rights at the state level after Dobbs. California, for example, entrenched the right to obtain the procedure in its state constitution in 2022. But even in Republican-led states, voters have unerringly chosen to protect (or at least not erase) abortion rights in ballot initiatives and referendums. In 2019, for example, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that there was a right to obtain an abortion in the state constitution that existed independently of Roe. Republican state lawmakers quickly sought to overturn that ruling with a constitutional amendment that would declare that it contained no such protections for abortion