Trying to spin the ballot

Frank LaRose and his fellow Republicans on the Ohio Ballot Board are up to their old tricks again, massaging ballot language for political advantage. Last week they approved, over the objections of the two Democrats on the five-member board, the description that voters will see at their polling place for a proposed amendment to the Ohio Constitution that would protect abortion and other reproductive rights. What other reproductive rights? The summary description, known as ballot language, doesn't say, merely that the amendment deals with "an individual right to one's own reproductive medical treatment, including but not limited to abortion." The amendment itself actually makes clear what those other rights are: "contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one's own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion." Yes, abortion is the primary focus of the amendment, but voters should be told what other rights would be protected were Issue 1, as the proposed amendment will be known when it appears on the November ballot, to pass. Or consider how the summary language, drafted by LaRose's office, refers to a fetus as "an unborn child," which is terminology the pro-life movement tends to use. The amendment refers to a "fetus." LaRose, Ohio's secretary of state, waved away those and other concerns by pointing out that the full text of the amendment would be posted at polling locations. If that's the case, why not put the amendment's full text on the ballot? The answer is that the GOP Ballot Board members want to spin the language voters will see in a way that could hamper passage of Issue 1. It's such a blatant attempt that supporters of Issue 1 announced Monday that they would ask the Ohio Supreme Court to order changes to the ballot language or to include the full text of the amendment. The full text is the better and more transparent option. It's questionable whether the Republican-dominated Supreme Court will go against LaRose. Even if the court does, voters can expect LaRose and the two other GOP Ballot Board members to do the bare minimum to fix whatever problems the court identifies. We've seen this play out before, in the fight over the language LaRose and the GOP Ballot Board members approved for the proposed amendment that appeared on the ballot in a special election earlier this month. It failed, but it would have made the Ohio Constitution harder to change in part by raising the threshold for passing future amendments from a simple majority to 60 percent. The Ohio Supreme Court ordered the Ballot Board to clean up some, but not all, of the confusing summary language, including altering the title, which originally was "Elevating The Standards To Qualify For And To Pass Any Constitutional Amendment." It was changed to "Elevating The Standards To Qualify For An Initiated Constitutional Amendment And To Pass A Constitutional Amendment." Although those changes brought a little more clarity, they didn't address the overly positive way the proposed amendment was described. "Elevating" is not a neutral word; it usually conveys something good, which was what the Republicans on the Ballot Board were trying to do. Fortunately, voters saw through the ruse, overwhelmingly rejecting what was identified on this month's ballot as Issue 1. (The coincidence that it and the abortion-rights amendment on the November ballot share the same issue number might well cause confusion, in particular because some opponents of the first Issue 1 campaigned for its passage on the grounds that it would make passing an abortion-rights amendment harder.) It's disappointing that LaRose would resort to such linguistic tricks. As Ohio's chief elections official, he should be striving for neutral language to summarize ballot initiatives, regardless of his personal political views. Recall that LaRose, who is running in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate next year, pushed to make the Constitution harder to amend, something he said at one point was "100 percent" about abortion. He's likewise been adamant in his opposition to abortion. LaRose is well within his rights to campaign for or against candidates and issues, but Ohioans elected him to oversee elections in a fair manner. He hasn't done that when it comes to ballot language. This will hardly be the only deception that Ohio voters will have to deal with as they try to sort out whether or not to support Issue 1. (Polling shows roughly 58 percent of Ohioans support abortion rights.) Another Ballot Board member, state Sen. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, claimed that the amendment was an "an assault on parental rights." The amendment makes no mention of stripping parents of any rights, but such claims are in line with Republican attempts to gin up fear and outrage to advance their political agenda. "No one should be fooled by the clever language of this amendment," Gavarone said. "It's designed to be broad. So broad that should it pass it is unequivocally true that access to painful late-term abortions will be written into Ohio's Constitution." That's not what the amendment would do. It literally says that "abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability," although there is an exception to "protect the pregnant patient's life or health." Perhaps Gavarone misread the amendment, but more likely she's trying to spin it to confuse voters into voting against Issue 1, just as the language approved by the Ballot Board is intended to do. Voters shouldn't fall for tricks.