By Ed Kilgore, Intelligencer
Aug 9, 2023

After the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last summer, Ohio voters put an initiative on the ballot to amend the state’s constitution to protect a right to an abortion. They were following in the footsteps of voters in several other states who have done the same in the face of Republican-led efforts to ban abortion outright. But then Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature (whose own near-total ban on abortion is snagged in the courts) tried to pull a fast one.

Republican lawmakers created a single-issue August special election in which voters would confront a constitutional amendment called Issue 1 that would raise the threshold for voter approval of future amendments (beginning immediately) from a simple majority to 60 percent. The idea, of course, was to make passage of the abortion-rights amendment in November significantly more difficult. On Tuesday night, though, their sneak attack failed, and Issue 1 was defeated. The Associated Press called the race for “No on Issue 1,” with the initiative being rejected by a 3-2 margin with a bit less than half the expected vote counted. Eventually the “no” vote wound up winning by a 57 percent to 43 percent margin. Turnout was over a third of the voting-eligible populations, about double the turnout in the last Ohio statewide single-issue special election in 2018.

Continued: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/08/ohio-blows-up-the-republican-plan-to-block-abortion-rights.html