COLUMBUS, Ohio — Groups hoping to enshrine abortion rights in Ohio’s constitution delivered nearly double the number of signatures needed to place an amendment on the fall statewide ballot, aiming to signal sweeping widespread support for an issue that still faces the threat of needing a significantly increased victory margin.
At a news conference, Copeland said the 422 boxes delivered “are filled with hope and love and dreams of freedom, of bodily autonomy, of health, of being able to say, ‘We decide what happens to us.'” Protect Women Ohio, the opposition campaign, downplayed the huge number of signatures submitted, saying they were collected with help from paid signature-gatherers funded in part of the American Civil Liberties Union, which it described as “anti-parent.” Abortion foes contend that the Ohio amendment has the potential to trump the state’s abortion-related parental consent law, though the lawyers who wrote it deny the claim.
But the ruling that might have the biggest impact favored abortion opponents. It allowed an August special election to proceed that will seek to raise the threshold for passing future amendments — including as soon as November — from a 50%-plus-one simple majority that has been in place since 1912 to a 60% majority. Abortion rights amendments in other states have tended to pass with more than 55% but less than 60% of the vote.