Abortion rights groups claim victory in Ohio special election

It's not primarily about abortion rights. This vote was about preventing people from voting.

Each bullet point of the amendment was more fuckery than the last, and it starts with the 60% threshold.

More egregious than that was that it was going to move the signature requirement to get something onto the ballot from 5% of half the counties, to 5% of all the counties, significantly raising the cost to get anything accomplished (other than through the gerrymandered legislature).

Even more egregious, they wanted to eliminate the ten day period to fix any issues with the signatures. So you'd submit the signatures, and some rural county commissioner would say "this street belongs to the next county over". Now your signatures are invalid and you throw the entire effort into the trash.

If this passes, it would have pulled up the ladder. It would have prevented any other amendment supported by the people of Ohio.

This is Ohio. The Republicans will just keep calling referendums on the same thing over and over again until they get the results they want. They don't care. They literally use dirty tricks to circumvent what the citizens want every year. Just look at how medical marijuana played out.

First try: The governor gets the bank to cancel the account of the pro-weed side, because the organization had the word "marijuana" in its name. No bank account, can't be a real group, can't put something on the ballot. Sucks to be you.

Second try: The legislature tried and failed to keep the legal weed issue off the ballot. So instead, they put their own weed issue on the ballot that would forever prevent legal weed in Ohio (even if the first issue passed), and then gave it a name that was almost identical to the pro-weed issue. I seem to remember that neither ended up passing because voters were, as intended, confused, and just having the second issue on the ballot split the vote.

Third try: The issue got on the ballot, the polls were high, everyone in the state basically was ready to stand out in the rain and vote in favor of medical marijuana. So the legislature called a special session and passed their own legal medical marijuana law, and then convinced the courts that their law made the ballot issue obsolete, so it was thrown out.

BUT, the legislature's version was a clusterfuck in that the legislature had to personally approve applications for grow ops and dispensaries. A few hundred businesses applied for the permit, and, last I checked, 0 were approved. This led to a situation where it was legal to have medical marijuana, but not legal to buy or grow it, or bring it in from out of state. Which means if you get caught with weed, the cops couldn't cite you for having weed (if you had your med card), but they could site you for buying or transporting that weed, because there's no way to legally get it in the state.

That was like six or seven years ago, and I haven't kept up with it, but if there's a single legal dispensary in Ohio, I will be incredibly surprised. The whole point was to not approve any.