Vote NO on Issues 2, 3, 4 & 5

The following op-ed was submitted to The Columbus Dispatch by former Ohio Senate President Richard Finan and published on Friday, Oct. 7.

Should State Issues 2-5 be approved on Nov. 8? No

Politics is far from perfect, but removing voters from the process won’t improve it. Nor is our democracy improved by bureaucrats with blank checks or special interests with a constitutional leg up on the rest of us.

Yet, removing Ohio voters from the process that determines the districts of their representatives to Congress and the General Assembly is exactly what State Issue 4 would do. Further, State Issues 2 through 5 would weaken the protection voters enjoy against election fraud while opening gaping loopholes for special interests and creating a whole new level of expensive bureaucracy. RICHARD H . FINAN

How, a reader might ask, could reform sound so good and be so bad? The answer is that the devil is in the details, and the few details that are provided in these proposed amendments to the Ohio Constitution invite judicial involvement on almost every question. Here are just a few of the problems:

• Issue 2 would allow more people to vote before the election but contains not one provision to assure voters that those votes are protected from fraud. In fact, in combination, Issues 2 and 5 obliterate Supreme Court rulings, Ohio attorneys general opinions and secretary of state policies that have protected the integrity of the vote in Ohio for generations.

• Issue 3 would limit the dollar amount people could give to candidates but would allow special interests never-before-imagined opportunities to stuff secondhand money into campaigns. For example, while it would prohibit Ohio’s employers from making political contributions, it would allow millionaires, such as Jerry Springer, the 2004 Democratic man of the year, to spend his own money unchecked for his promised campaign.

• Issue 4 would snatch the vote out of the hands of Ohioans while replacing that vote with a board of bureaucrats sealed off from the public. Ohioans have in every decade since 1970 thrown the rascals out, when they wearied of a party or its leaders. It is hard to believe that Ohio voters do not relish this power or that, as some reformers have said, are too easily tricked into misusing it.

Yet Issue 4 would replace voters’ ability to control the people who draw the federal and state legislative districts and gives the job to bureaucrats protected from the voters. These bureaucrats also would be given an unlimited claim on state tax dollars.

Further, the bureaucrats would be guided by only one goal: creating districts with as equal a number of Democrats and Republicans as possible. That goal sounds good but dismisses important considerations to keep communities of interest, such as the black community, together. It ignores current goals that keep local government jurisdictions together and that promote the grouping of neighboring communities.

So-called test maps that have been generated under the complicated mathematical formulas voters are being asked to approve in Issue 4 show a congressional district stretching from just west of Youngstown to Lima’s eastern suburbs. This is not an isolated problem. Another district on that same map creates a district running from Akron to the Ohio River.

Just as frightening, Issue 4 opens the door to anyone to submit a map; that’s frightening because the maps for your members of Congress could come from Wall Street bankers or any group that has a special interest in whom you send to Congress. Loopholes in Issue 4 not only would set up this bizarre situation, the loopholes would ensure it.

Then comes Issue 5, which would remove the secretary of state as Ohio’s chief elections officer. That job, performed by dozens of different Democratic and Republican elected officials for generations, would be handed over to another appointed board. The board would mean more full-time state jobs and benefits for bureaucrats. The bureaucrats would set their own salaries, vacations and staffing needs, and taxpayers would get the bill.

Here, again, voters would lose their right to throw the rascals out when they do not like the performance of an elected official. Instead, voters would have another board of officials removed from their reach.

Does anyone believe that voters are better served by faceless people on boards and commissions?

Clearly, all these issues have flaws, and the flaws run far wider and deeper than space allows to be listed here. But one more flaw must be mentioned: These matters do not belong in the Ohio Constitution, precisely because it is difficult and expensive to change the constitution. When the problems with these amendments are felt by the public, the public cannot correct them without more campaigns for constitutional amendments costing millions of dollars.

The argument, then, is not that the state political systems do not need improvement. The argument is that Issues 2 through 5 are not improvements in either substance or place. They are, at worst, special-interest schemes or, at best, well-intentioned attempts to build a bridge too far.

In either case, State Issues 2 through 5 should be flatly rejected.

Richard H. Finan, former president of the Ohio Senate, is an attorney with Calfee, Halter and Grisworld in Columbus and leads Ohio First, a group opposing State Issues 2-5.