Ohio Just Showed the World How to Save Democracy
The vote was billed as a referendum on abortion, but it’s also the latest chapter in the 2,500-year struggle to perfect popular government.
It certainly did.
Photographer: Megan Jelinger/Bloomberg
Voters in Ohio just saved their republican liberty, and in a way people from ancient Athens to Switzerland would recognize: by overriding representative democracy with the direct kind.
By about 57% to 43%, Ohioans rejected a proposal by the Republican state legislature that would have made it harder to use ballot measures to amend the state constitution. Currently such changes require the approval of a simple majority of votes; Tuesday’s proposal, called Issue 1, would have raised that to 60%. As my colleague Jonathan Bernstein notes, it was widely seen as a Republican attempt to short-circuit a ballot measure scheduled for November that would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution.