Court Opinion

ID: 9835464
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-02 02:26:03.691264+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:45:04.319925
License: Public Domain

French, J.,
concurring.
{¶48} I agree with the court’s resolution in this case. I write separately, however, to raise a concern regarding the Ohio Constitution’s provisions for initiative petitions to enact laws.
{¶49} The Ohio Constitution reserves to the people of Ohio “the power to propose to the General Assembly laws and amendments to the constitution, and to adopt or reject the same at the polls on a referendum vote as hereinafter provided.” Ohio Constitution, Article II, Section 1. But neither the people nor the public officials elected to accommodate them can effectively exercise that constitutional power under deadlines and timelines that no longer make sense.
{¶ 50} This case highlights the unworkable timeline that Article II, Sections lb and lg impose and the need to amend it. Considering the complexity of the initiative-and-referendum process for enacting laws and the large number of signatures that must be collected and verified, getting an initiative on the first general-election ballot following its submission to the secretary of state becomes nearly impossible when the process spawns litigation, as it so often does.
{¶ 51} As an illustration, consider the ten-day time period that Article II, Section lb gives the secretary of state to review the signatures and submit the petition to the General Assembly—a timeline that is obviously insufficient for a meaningful review of the approximately 171,000 signatures the committee submitted in this case. Here, the secretary took the reasonable action of requiring additional review by the boards of elections, and by doing so, he missed the deadline for submission to the General Assembly and pushed all subsequent deadlines closer to the November election. That delay, combined with the delay resulting from the current litigation, doomed any chance of the initiative appearing on the November 2016 ballot.
{¶ 52} The system is broken and calls for modern amendments to fix it. I respectfully ask the Ohio Constitutional Modernization Commission and the General Assembly to address these issues and prevent another situation like this from arising.