(COLUMBUS, Ohio)—Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine today rejected the petition for a proposed amendment to the Ohio Constitution submitted by the committee Ohioans for Ohio.
On October 30th, the Ohio Attorney General’s Office received a written petition to amend the Ohio Constitution by adding sections related to state sovereignty, enforcement of constitutions, and violations of oaths of office. Attorney General DeWine’s letter rejected the summary for several reasons, including
- The submitted amendment is much broader in scope that the summary indicates,
- The summary omits key pieces of information within the proposed amendment, and those omissions prevent the summary from meeting the fair and truthful standard, and
- The summary contains at least seven statements claiming what the amendment does not do, but those statements are not specifically contained in the proposed amendment.
“For these reasons, I am unable to certify the summary as a fair and truthful statement of the proposed amendment,” DeWine stated in his letter rejecting the petition. “However, I must caution that this letter is not intended to represent an exhaustive list of all defects in the submitted summary.”
In order for a constitutional amendment to proceed, an initial petition containing summary language of the amendment and 1,000 signatures from Ohio registered voters must be submitted to the Ohio Attorney General. Once the summary language and initial signatures are certified, the Ohio Ballot Board would determine if the amendment contains a single issue or multiple issues. The petitioners must then collect signatures for each issue from registered voters in each of 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties, equal to 5 percent of the total vote cast in the county for the office of governor at the last gubernatorial election. Total signatures collected statewide must also equal 10 percent of the total vote cast for the office of governor at the last gubernatorial election.
The full text of today’s letter and of the initiative petitions submitted can be found at www.OhioAttorneyGeneral.gov/BallotInitiatives.
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