Thursday, September 23, 2004
Inventing Election Law in Ohio
Efforts to put official English on the 1986 Florida ballot were challenged because the petitions were not circulated in Spanish as well as English. Opponents knew they would lose if the voters were allowed to work their will so they decided to invent a new election law and pray a judge would help them out.
That same story is being rerun in Ohio on the subject of homosexual marriage:
A group favoring same-sex marriages is running out of time in its attempt to stop a Nov. 2 vote on a proposal to ban the unions in the Ohio Constitution.
If Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell does not invalidate 11,047 supplemental petitions by midnight, it appears that Ohioans to Protect Marriage will have enough signatures to place the issue on the statewide ballot.
Ohioans Protecting the Constitution, a gay alliance that opposes State Issue 1, asked the secretary of state yesterday to invalidate the 144,247 signatures on the petitions, saying the petitions lacked the required summary of the proposal, certified by the state attorney general.
Attorneys for Ohioans to Protect Marriage argued before a hearing officer that the state constitution requires no summary, and that for the secretary of state to rule otherwise would violate the right of initiative petition.
Jeffrey A. Shafer, representing the petitioners, said the state constitution requires only that the title and text of the proposed constitutional amendment appear on petitions. "It nowhere calls for a summary," he said.
|posted by Jim on 5:06 PM|
Link
. . .
|
. . .
|
