The following articlewas originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Voting legislation is advancing in the Ohio Senate. Last week, a committee approved a measure prohibiting ranked choice voting and heard from proponents of a plan to require proof of citizenship for voting.
Both bills are retreads of proposals that didn’t make the cut last session.
Ranked Choice
The measure banning ranked choice voting, Senate Bill 63, has the backing of well-known conservative lobbying outfits like the Heritage Foundation and a few lesser-known ones, too.
Honest Elections Project Action is one of a several a 501(c) organization connected with former Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo. The Opportunity Solutions Project is a Florida thinktank that lobbies state and federal governments on issues like restricting food assistance and loosening child labor laws. When state lawmakers proposed raising the threshold for approving constitutional amendments, OSP was the only group to show up.
Opportunity Solutions Projects’ parent organization got more than $2 million from Leonard Leo’s Concord Fund.
But for all that conservative backing, the measure itself is bipartisan. State Sen. Bill DeMora, D-Columbus, is co-sponsoring the bill, calling ranked choice a “disaster waiting to happen.”
Supporters believe ranked choice will give voters more options, but that’s precisely the problem for DeMora. He warned about races in Oregon with 50-plus candidates for city council and described a hypothetical four-person race where the top two finishers got 45% and 30% of the vote.
“I’d expect each of us to agree that the first candidate with 45% of the vote won — that’s a clear victory,” DeMora argued. “No one here today would be upset if they won their next election by 15%, but using ranked choice voting, that candidate could very easily lose.”
Denise Riley from the organization Rank the Vote Ohio, pushed back on DeMora’s horror stories. Making an allusion to Baskin Robbins, she argued DeMora and other supporters want to reduce voting to a binary choice — chocolate or vanilla.
“I’m here to tell you that the public really wants and likes more choices and having more say in their government,” she wrote. “You should give them that say. It is your job to represent the people you serve.”
The measure also got pushback from the conservative perspective as well. Marcell Strbich is a retired Air Force veteran and grassroots “election integrity” activist. He regularly testifies in favor more restrictive elections policies, and submitted testimony in opposition of the bill in March along with 60-plus others.
He noted — as several others have — that lawmakers actually can’t ban ranked choice voting. The state supreme court determined more than 70 years ago that local elections are a local matter. The sponsors attempt to sidestep that ruling by withholding state funding if a municipality approves a ranked choice voting system.
“If Ohio’s Republicans and Democrats want to ban RCV, amend the Ohio Constitution,” Strbich argued. “That’s the transparent, democratic way to respect our legal framework. Instead, S.B. 63 takes a shortcut, using state funds to coerce counties and granting the Secretary of State vague, unchecked power. This isn’t reform — it’s a power grab.”
Last week, though, the Senate committee approved the bill as-is. It’s awaiting a floor vote.
Proof of citizenship
The Senate measure, S.B. 153, would require every voter to show proof of citizenship to register to vote. Under current law only citizens may vote, and officials regularly comb through the rolls looking for individuals improperly registered. The only deterrent against registering and voting illegally is the threat of prosecution. That’s worked remarkably well.
Nearly every registration flagged by the secretary of state has turned out to be a false positive. A rigorous review by the attorney general found just six cases of illegal voting. In an electorate of 8.1 million voters that’s .00007%, or less than one ten thousandth of 1%.
The bill, sponsored by state Sens. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, and Andrew Brenner, R-Delaware, tosses in a few other conservative wish list items alongside the citizenship provisions. They place new strictures on the petition process, including requiring paid canvassers wear a badge identifying themselves as such, and they eliminate the use of ballot drop boxes.
The only group to show up in support of the idea was the Foundation for Government Accountability Action — the new name for Opportunity Solutions Project. The organization submitted testimony under both names for the ranked choice measure. Rather than sending their own staffers, the organization hired local lobbyists like Harrison Siders.
Siders praised the measure for closing a “loophole” when it comes to potentially illegal registrations — already a felony offense — and the requirement of monthly voter roll audits — a likely violation of federal law prohibiting any systematic removal of a voter within 90 days of a federal election.
He argued the bill “respects the rights of lawful voters while putting in place practical, achievable safeguards that will fortify our election system against fraud.”
Notably, University of Maryland researchers have found more than 21.3 million Americans — more than 9% of voting age citizens — don’t have ready access to the documents required under the bill.
DeMora pressed Siders on the ballot drop boxes and he brought up highly publicized fire-bombings in the Portland, OR area, but acknowledged no ballots in Ohio have been compromised.
“If someone wants to fire-bomb a ballot drop off box, they can fire-bomb a post box,” DeMora continued. “How is this going to protect the integrity of ballots, of absentee ballots and stuff, when if someone wants to bomb something, they’re going to bomb something?”
Siders said a ballot drop box likely has more ballots he argued than a home or public post box and lawmakers should focus on “critical points” in the voting system.
