The push to put a broad easing of ballot access before Ohio voters this fall has suffered a big setback: Their sweeping proposal has been chopped into four pieces by the Republicans in charge of the process, quadrupling the proponents' signature-gathering work and potentially diluting momentum for their cause.
Ohioans for Secure and Fair Elections, the coalition of mostly left-leaning groups promoting the referendum and spearheaded by the state's branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, says it will appeal to the state Supreme Court to keep the package intact.
The groups say their aim is to boost turnout starting in 2022 in one of the nation's most populous political battlegrounds, which has been tilting from true purple toward a more Republican red in recent years.
The Ohio Ballot Board voted Monday, with the three GOP members in favor and the two Democrats opposed, to divide the single proposal into quarters — one about election procedures, one on voter registration, a third on the rights of disabled citizens and the last mandating post-election audits of the returns. The board concluded that's what's required under a state law that says proposed constitutional amendments put before the electorate must be confined to a single topic.
"To take a very large idea like 'every eligible voter should be able to cast a ballot in a convenient and efficient way,' that's something, that's something we can all get behind, but to say that's a single subject or purpose is a stretch," GOP Secretary of State Frank LaRose had argued.
Proponents said that was a subterfuge. "It's a strategic move on the part of the Republican Party to, you know, put the kibosh on this," asserted Don McTigue, a lawyer for the coalition.
Ohioans for Secure and Fair Elections, which had already collected petition signatures for the original proposal, must now collect at least 1,000 more on each of the four proposed amendments to be considered by the Ballot Board again. If its appeal is unsuccessful, the coalition would have until July 1 to collect 443,000 signatures from registered voters on each of the four proposals.
Central parts of the package would add Ohio to the roster of 16 states where eligible residents are automatically registered when the do business with the motor vehicle bureau; would permit registration and balloting on Election Day, like 21 other states; and would guarantee four weeks of in-person early voting.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.