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Last summer, Republican policymakers in South Dakota thought they’d come up with a clever idea. After health care advocates created a ballot referendum to put Medicaid expansion on the statewide ballot, GOP lawmakers concluded that they could thwart the effort by changing the rules in the middle of the game.
The plan was relatively straightforward: Republicans created a ballot measure of their own that would, if approved, force Medicaid expansion supporters to get 60% of the vote to succeed, instead of a simple majority. What’s more, they scheduled a vote for June — when turnout was expected to be low — in order to further help tip the scales.
The GOP’s attempt to pull a fast one didn’t work: South Dakota might be a red state, but voters had no use for the Republican scheme to rig democracy. By a lopsided margin, South Dakotans voted to keep the threshold for Medicaid expansion at 50%, and months later, the state’s electorate also approved the policy itself.
All of this came to mind watching events unfold in Ohio. NBC News reported:
Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected a Republican-backed ballot measure Tuesday that would make it harder to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, delivering a major win for reproductive rights supporters. ... With 97% of precincts reporting, 56.7% voted against the measure, while 43.3% voted to support it, according to the Ohio Secretary of State’s office.
As we discussed yesterday, after reproductive rights proponents moved forward with plans to force a statewide vote on amending the state constitution, Ohio Republicans created something called Issue 1. Like the South Dakota effort, the goal to force supporters of abortion rights to get 60% of the vote, instead of majority rule. Also like the South Dakota effort, GOP officials scheduled a vote at an unusual time, hoping low turnout would give the right an added advantage.
And as was the case in South Dakota, voters in this red state put democracy ahead of a brazen Republican tactic.
Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, a Republican proponent of the scheme, recently predicted, “I think Issue 1 is going to be super close. ... It’s probably going to be decided by a few thousand people.”
According to the latest tallies, opponents of Issue 1 outnumber supporters by more than 400,000 votes.
It was not, in other words, “super close.”
Looking ahead, the demise of Issue 1 means that Ohioans will be able to vote in November on whether to add reproductive rights to the state constitution, undoing a six-week abortion ban Ohio Republicans imposed on the state after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Whichever side gets a majority will prevail — though yesterday’s vote offers a pretty big hint about the direction of the prevailing winds.
Of course, the reverberations extend well beyond the Buckeye State. As The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne explained in his latest column, “When you do everything you can to rig an election and still lose, you have a problem. Voters in Ohio told the state’s Republican Party on Tuesday that it has a big problem, and they sent that message to the GOP nationwide.”