The maneuver paid off last week. The GOP flipped three U.S. House seats, a windfall in light of that chamber’s tiny overall margin.

This sequence of events, besides illustrating the potential ramifications of state judicial elections, also captures the predicament that progressive lawyers find themselves in after Donald Trump’s victory, which cements conservatives’ stronghold on federal courts for the foreseeable future. More than before, progressives working to protect people’s rights will need state supreme courts to be hospitable to lawsuits that are increasingly dead on arrival at the federal level. They’ll have a shrinking range of options in states where conservatives have locked in a right-wing court.

The outcome of dozens of supreme court races last week set the stage for how critical legal battles from abortion rights to gerrymandering could play out in state courts across the country. And the results were mixed, with plenty for both liberals and conservatives to celebrate.

On one side, Democrats expanded their majority on Michigan’s supreme court. In Kentucky, a candidate who ran with the backing of Democrats flipped a seat held by a retiring conservative justice. In Mississippi, a conservative justice endorsed by the state GOP suffered a shock defeat. Montanans maintained a liberal lean on their court, likely keeping it a thorn on the side of GOP leaders. And Governor Tim Walz’s appointees prevailed in Minnesota.

Republicans, meanwhile, expanded their majority on the supreme court in Ohio, leaving Democrats with just one seat, and they may do the same in North Carolina, pending final results. Conservative justices in Arizona survived a campaign to oust them over their decision to revive a long-buried abortion ban. Texas’ high courts jumped further to the right even if their partisan composition—all GOP judges—didn’t change. The elections are also likely to embolden conservatives in Arkansas and Oklahoma. 

Bolts walks you through each supreme court race that took place last week, state by state:

Alabama

Justice Sarah Stewart, a Republican, easily prevailed over her Democratic opponent to become Alabama’s chief justice. Her win keeps the state supreme court all-GOP, and largely unchanged from the court that ruled in February that frozen embryos are children, endangering IVF treatments; Stewart joined the majority in that decision. 

Chris McCool, a Republican appeals court judge, won the race to replace Stewart as an associate justice. (He faced no opponent.) McCool, like the rest of Alabama’s judicial candidates, dodged questions about the court’s IVF ruling during the campaign. 

Alaska

Voters retained Justices Dario Borghesan and Jennifer Henderson, a result well in line with the state’s political history: No Alaska justice has lost a retention race since 1962. There have been some conservative efforts to reshape the court over dissatisfaction with its rulings on abortion, but neither Borghesan or Henderson has ruled on the issue since joining the court.

Arizona

Progressives mounted an unusually vigorous effort to oust Clint Bolick and Kathryn King, two conservative justices who voted to revive a near-total abortion ban this spring. But no Arizona justice has ever lost one of these up-or-down retention elections, and voters kept up that record this fall: Bolick and King secured new terms with 58 and 59 percent of the vote, respectively. 

Meanwhile, Republicans failed in their effort to end judicial elections in the state. Prop 137 would have handed supreme court justices a permanent appointment until they hit the mandatory retirement age, effectively freezing the conservative court in place, but voters rejected it by an overwhelming majority of 77 to 23 percent.

Arkansas

When the Arkansas Supreme Court knocked an abortion rights measure off the ballot in August on a 4-3 vote, Justice Rhonda Wood wrote the majority opinion, while Justice Karen Baker dissented. “Why are the respondents and the majority determined to keep this particular vote from the people?” said Baker, a justice with a moderate reputation.

Three months later, on Election Day, Baker beat Wood in the race for chief justice. This promotion will give her more influence over the Arkansas judiciary since the chief justice supervises state courts and names court administrators. 

And yet it’s conservatives who stand to gain ground on the court after this election, despite moderate judges winning both seats in contention. This is due to the fact that several justices played an odd game of musical chairs this year, running for seats other than their own. Besides Baker and Wood, Justice Courtney Hudson successfully ran to change seats earlier this year to circumvent the state’s mandatory retirement rules by a few extra years. 

Baker and Hudson’s victories have now created two vacancies that GOP Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a staunch conservative, will get to fill. This is expected to increase the conservative bloc on this seven-member court from four to five justices. (Importantly, the state constitution bars an appointed justice from seeking a full term, so both of these seats will be on the ballot without an incumbent in 2026.)

Colorado

The Colorado Supreme Court’s short-lived decision to bar Trump from the ballot grabbed international headlines last year. But it didn’t make waves at the ballot box this fall. Faced with a minor conservative effort to target her, Justice Monica Márquez, who sided with the majority in that decision, prevailed with 64 percent of the vote in an up-or-down retention vote. 

Two justices who dissented in that ruling prevailed with similar numbers: 67 percent for Maria Berkenkotter and 63 percent for Brian Boatright. And while there is some geographic variation in the results, it’s not very pronounced; Márquez did better in blue Denver than in El Paso and Weld counties, large conservative bastions, but she received a majority in the latter as well. 

Florida

No justice has ever lost a retention election in Florida, and no history was made in 2024. More than 62 percent of Floridians voted to keep Justices Renetha Francis and Meredith Sasso in an up-or-down vote. Francis and Sasso were appointed to the court by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis over the last two years, and they’ve quickly made their mark as conservatives even by the standards of this right-wing court. 

Idaho

Chief Justice Richard Bevan, a former Republican prosecutor who was appointed to the court by Governor Butch Otter, was unopposed as he ran for a new term. Anticipating his reelection, his colleagues this fall chose to keep him as their chief for an additional six years.  

Illinois

Democrats will retain a 5-to-2 majority on the Illinois Supreme Court after an uneventful general election.

Democratic Justice Joy Cunningham ran unopposed in the first district, which encompasses Cook County; Republican Justice Lisa Holder White ran unopposed in the fourth district, located in western Illinois.

Indiana

The three justices who faced up-or-down retention votes easily passed the test, each with roughly 70 percent of the vote.

Iowa

Justice David May was facing voters for the first time since his 2022 appointment by Republican Governor Kim Reynolds. This summer, he joined a narrow majority of the court to lift an injunction against the state’s abortion ban, but there was no organized effort to defeat him this fall. He prevailed 63 to 37 percent in an up-or-down retention election.

Kentucky

Liberals gained ground on the Kentucky supreme court. Pamela Goodwine, a state judge who ran with Democratic support, easily won a supreme court race over an opponent aligned with Republicans. She will replace a conservative justice who is retiring. 

With conservatives already frustrated that this court was too moderate, last week’s result comes on the heels of another defeat in the 2022 midterms, when an anti-abortion lawmaker failed in his effort to oust a Democratic-appointed justice. 

Goodwine will be the first Black woman on the Kentucky supreme court.  

“As we look to our state courts to protect certain civil liberties because our federal courts are becoming far less hospitable, we’re always happy to see this court at least remain an option for litigation, and are certainly pleased to see the Kentucky Supreme Court become more representative of the population it serves,” said Corey Shapiro, legal director at the ACLU of Kentucky. Shapiro also cautioned that this court tends to be less starkly polarized than those in some other states, making it tricky to predict how justices will come down on any one case.

Louisiana

The state this year drew a new map for its judicial districts, for the first time since 1997. The long-overdue redistricting created a second majority-Black district as many justices had demanded. Republican Justice Scott Crichton retired from the court, and he will be replaced by John Guidry, a Black Democrat who ran unopposed for this new district.

Maryland

Voters easily retained three justices in up-or-down retention votes. This fits Maryland voters’ usual approach to judicial elections: All of the court’s current members have won retention races with at least 75 percent of the vote.

Michigan

Democrats expanded their majority on this supreme court last week. They swept both seats on the ballot, and are now ahead 5 to 2. 

Justice Kyra Harris Bolden, who was appointed to the bench by Governor Gretchen Whitmer last year, won a full term. She will be joined by Kimberly Ann Thomas, a law professor who currently runs the Juvenile Justice Clinic at the University of Michigan and who was running for the seat held by a retiring Republican justice. They each won by more than 20 percentage points over GOP opponents.

In recent years, the court has issued party-line decisions on major cases that have upheld direct democracy and curtailed the harsh sentencing of minors, and last week’s results are likely to strengthen the court as a pathway for civil rights litigants. 

Minnesota

Two justices appointed by Democratic Governor Tim Walz easily prevailed against more conservative challengers. Justice Karl Procaccini, who joined the court last year after working as Walz’s general counsel, beat Matthew Hanson, a local attorney, and Chief Justice Natalie Hudson beat Stephen Emery, a candidate who in the past has amplified false claims about voter fraud. 

As a result, all members of this court remain selected by Democratic governors.

Mississippi

Justice Dawn Beam ran for reelection with the full backing of the state Republican Party, which usually goes a long way in this red state, but she suffered a shock defeat at the hands of David Sullivan, a lawyer who has worked as a defense attorney and public defender and was labeled “a stealth candidate” by The Sun Herald. 

Beam has one of the most consistently conservative records on the Mississippi supreme court, while Sullivan, the son of a former justice, gave few indications of his judicial philosophy during the campaign and did not respond to a request for comment from Bolts. Sullivan faulted Beam during the campaign for receiving the GOP’s endorsement in this nonpartisan race. 

Whether the court’s overall balance of power shifts isn’t yet settled, however. Jim Kitchens, one of the more moderate justices on the court, will face a runoff on Nov. 26 against Jenifer Branning, a self-described “constitutional conservative” running with the support of the GOP. 

Missouri

Voters adopted a constitutional amendment codifying a right to abortion access, overturning the state’s abortion ban. But the measure was almost knocked off the ballot just two months ago when the state supreme court rejected a challenge to the amendment by only a narrow 4-3 vote. 

Two of the justices who dissented in that decision and would have voided the abortion rights measure easily secured new terms on this supreme court last week: Justices Kelly Broniec and Ginger Gooch received 62 and 63 percent of the vote, respectively, in up-or-down retention elections. Broniec and Gooch also voted this fall to not intervene in the case of Marcellus Williams, who was executed by the state despite the paucity of evidence against him. 

Montana

The Montana supreme court has been a thorn on the side of the Republican politicians who are running the rest of the state government. The justices have struck down a series of GOP laws in recent years, including restrictions on abortion, trans rights, and voter registration. “It’s our last backstop,” Keaton Sunchild, director of civic engagement at the nonprofit Western Native Voice, told Bolts this summer about the sort of civil rights litigation his organization supports. 

Conservatives were hoping to make up a lot of ground this fall by winning both open seats on the ballot—these races are technically nonpartisan, but candidates often draw support from partisan officials and advocacy organizations—but they only secured one. Cory Swanson, who was backed by conservative interests, won the election for chief justice. But Katherine Bidegaray, who was endorsed by liberal interests, will join the court as an associate justice. She won by 8 percentage points in tough conditions, as the GOP swept all statewide partisan offices.

As a result, the court is likely to retain its liberal lean. The sitting justices have sometimes formed idiosyncratic alliances, making it difficult to neatly classify them into ideological camps. But Bidegaray’s victory means that the court would likely rule the same way if it had to reassess its recent election law or trans rights decisions, which came down in 5 to 2 rulings. 

“We are glad that for now the Supreme Court looks like it will protect freedoms enshrined in the Montana constitution,” Sunchild told Bolts after the results were announced.

Nebraska

Justice Stephanie Stacy faced an uneventful campaign as she ran in an up-or-down retention election. 76 percent of voters chose to keep her on the bench. 

New Mexico

Democratic Justice Briana Zamora easily prevailed in her first up-or-down retention election, with 71 percent of the vote. All five members of the state supreme court are Democrats. 

Nevada

Nevada holds regular judicial elections where candidates can challenge incumbents. But no one was running against Justices Elissa Cadish, Patricia Lee, and Lidia Stiglich this year.

North Carolina

A Democratic justice lost her reelection bid in North Carolina by just 401 votes four years ago, which paved the way for the GOP to take over the court two years later. Since then, Republican justices have promptly reversed decisions on gerrymandering, felony disenfranchisement, and voter ID, and changed gears in racial discrimination cases.

Democrats may be losing even more ground on the court this year. As of publication, Democratic Justice Allison Riggs trails Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin by a tight margin of roughly 7,700 votes (that’s 0.14 percentage points). The race remains unresolved pending the final count of mail and provisional ballots. 

Should Griffin retain his lead, the GOP would expand its majority on the court to a commanding 6 to 1. Griffin explicitly ran on preserving the recent rulings that have given a political edge to the GOP, including the decision that greenlit the state’s new congressional map. He also celebrated the court blessing new voter ID requirements, telling voters at a campaign event this spring, “How cool was it to show your ID when you go vote this year? It was pretty awesome, right?” 

Ohio

Republicans swept all three supreme court seats on Ohio’s ballot, boosted by the state’s conservative lean. As a result, they will significantly increase their control over the court, from 4-3 to 6-1. 

Two Democratic justices, Melody Stewart and Michael Donnelly, were defeated by large margins by Joe Deters, a Republican who is already on the court, and Megan Shanahan, a local judge. Republican Dan Hawkins, another local judge, won the third, open race.

These results add to the conservative takeover of Ohio’s supreme court two years ago, when Maureen O’Connor, a moderate Republican who had joined Democrats to strike down GOP gerrymanders, retired and was replaced by a more conservative Republican. The new bloc of GOP justices has been more united on major cases; most recently, they blessed a controversial maneuver by Republican officials to undermine redistricting reform.

Oregon

The court will retain its left-leaning majority: Five of its seven members, all justices appointed to the bench by Democratic governors, won new terms this fall after running unopposed.

Oklahoma

Conservatives cheered a startling victory in Oklahoma: Yvonne Kauger became the first justice in the state’s history to be ousted after losing an up-or-down retention vote. Kauger, who has been on this court since 1984, was dragged down by heavy spending from groups looking to push the bench to the right and she ultimately lost by less than one percent.

Two other justices, James Edmonson and Norma Gurich, survived the onslaught by very narrow margins. They, like Kauger, were appointed to the court by Democratic governors, and conservatives made the case that they were too liberal for the state, pointing for instance to a 5–to-4 ruling last year that affirmed a narrow right for a woman to access abortion when necessary to save her life. (Edmonson, Gurich, and Kauger were all in the majority of that decision.)

The power to appoint Kauger’s replacement now falls to Republican Governor Kevin Stitt, though his choice is restricted to a short list supplied by a nominating commission. The supreme court in recent years has repeatedly struck down priorities of Stitt’s, for instance his plan to privatize Medicaid, and the governor helped fund the campaign to oust the justices this fall.

South Dakota

Justice Scott Myren easily survived his first up-or-down retention election, with 80 percent of voters choosing to keep him. An appointee of Republican Governor Kristi Noem, Myren was the only justice to dissent from a ruling that invalidated a 2020 ballot measure legalizing marijuana, and described initiatives as “this bold experiment in citizen-led direct democracy.”

Tennessee

Dwight Tarwater was nominated to the supreme court last year by Republican Governor Bill Lee, cementing the court’s rightward shift, and he easily prevailed in his first up-or-down retention election, with roughly 72 percent of voters choosing to keep him on the bench.

Texas

Republican nominees continued their decades-old streak of winning statewide elections in Texas, sweeping all six elections for seats on the state’s two high courts. Justices Jane Bland, John Devine, and Jimmy Blacklock all secured new terms on the Texas supreme court, which recently upheld the state’s near-total abortion ban. 

For the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the court that has the ultimate jurisdiction on criminal cases, three archconservative Republicans will join the court. They each ousted a GOP incumbent in the March primary, part of an effort by Attorney General Ken Paxton to seek revenge against the judges who limited his power to prosecute election crimes. “MAKE JUSTICE GREAT AGAIN!” Gina Parker, one of the winning judges who ran by touting Paxton and Trump’s support, posted on Facebook after her victory.

Utah

An overwhelming majority of Utahns voted to retain Chief Justice Matthew Durrant. This summer, Durrant and his colleagues angered Republican lawmakers when they issued a unanimous ruling curtailing the legislature’s ability to override citizen ballot initiatives. Lawmakers tried to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to override that decision, but the court then voided that amendment, ruling that it used deceptive language.

Washington

Democrats dominated state elections in this blue state, sweeping all partisan statewide offices by double-digits. But the open race for state supreme court turned out to be exceedingly close, with just 0.8 percent separating candidates Sal Mungia and Dave Larson as of publication. This is a nonpartisan race, but Democratic leaders largely endorsed Mungia, while Larson, a local judge, said the state’s court system is too progressive.

Regardless, the court will retain a left-leaning majority. Two progressive justices, Steven González and Sheryl Gordon McCloud, secured new terms without facing any opponent.

West Virginia

Charles Trump, a Republican state senator who voted in favor of the state’s near-total ban on abortion in 2022, won a seat on the court this year without facing any opponent. He will join Justice Haley Bunn, who ran for reelection unopposed.

Wyoming

Justices John Flenn and Kate Fox, each originally selected for the court by a Republican governor, easily secured new terms.

The post How Supreme Court Elections Set the Stage for Coming Battles, from Voting to Abortion appeared first on Bolts.

The result is a blow to the democracy organizations that have been combating gerrymandering in the state. They mobilized on behalf of Issue 1 after the lengthy legal standoff with Ohio Republicans in 2022, when the GOP, in a repeat of the prior decade, drew maps that locked in comfortable majorities for their candidates.

It’s also a repeat of two prior defeats for similar ballot measures that would have created independent commissions in both 2005 and 2012. 

“It’s incredibly sad, and it’s not clear to me what the next steps are to improve our democracy,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause, an organization that was part of the coalition that collected hundreds of thousands of signatures that qualify Issue 1 for the ballot. “Addressing gerrymandering is so much about holding elected officials accountable and creating fair districts and fair elections so that we can actually have a functional government.” 

As of publication, the measure is trailing by roughly eight percentage points, with some ballots remaining to be counted.

While several polls in October showed Issue 1 with very large leads, those surveys were simply asking voters if they wanted to create an independent redistricting commission. The official language Ohioans saw on their ballot was very different: GOP officials wrote an official summary that characterized the measure as requiring gerrymandering rather than restricting it. A rare poll that tested the official language found the race effectively tied.

Voters came forward during the early voting period in October to warn that they felt tricked by the GOP-crafted summary. Songgu Kwon, a comic book writer living near Athens, told Bolts that he meant to support the independent redistricting commission but mistakenly voted against Issue 1 after feeling confused in the voting booth. “I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else,” he said. 

Other media outlets reported similar complaints from other voters who said they only realized after voting ‘no’ that they had meant to vote ‘yes.’ Turcer attributes Issue 1’s failure to the “incredibly deceptive ballot language,” telling Bolts, “elected officials were willing to do anything to stop Issue 1.” 

Opponents of Issue 1 defended the ballot language, with Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who drafted much of it, calling it an “honest explanation.” A spokesperson for Ohio Works, the committee that promoted the ‘no’ vote, said that, “If people go in and intend to vote for Issue 1, read the ballot language and vote no, they are not confused.” 

Issue 1 prevailed in Ohio’s urban centers, which are also the regions whose power the GOP’s gerrymanders have undercut, but it trailed in the more exurban and rural areas. 

Ohioans on the same day voted for Donald Trump for president, and the county-level results for Issue 1 broadly correlate with the presidential results, with more Republican areas opposing the proposed reform.

Aware that they had to persuade Ohioans who vote Republican in this red-leaning state, the ‘yes’ campaign made the case that stopping gerrymandering should not be a partisan issue.

“When you have a gerrymandered state, whether it’s Republicans or Democrats doing the gerrymandering, what you end up with is legislators who are not responsive to the citizens, and you end up with bad public policy, and it just holds your state back,” Chris Davey, a spokesperson for Citizens Not Politicians, the campaign for Issue 1, told Bolts.

One of the measure’s chief proponents was Maureen O’Connor, Ohio’s former Republican chief justice. O’Connor joined her Democratic colleagues on the state supreme court two years ago to strike down Republican-drawn maps seven separate times, but the GOP leaders ran out the clock until O’Connor retired in December of 2022 and her Republican replacement blessed gerrymanders. O’Connor also featured in advertising for Issue 1 this fall, telling voters that the measure “will restore power to where it belongs—with citizens, not politicians.”

But the state’s Republican leaders, including Governor Mike DeWine, rallied against Issue 1. The ‘no’ campaign appealed to Ohio’s overall red lean, making the case that the measure boiled down to an attempt by the Democratic Party to expand its influence on the state. “Don’t let Democrats rewrite the rules,” one ad for the ‘no’ campaign stated. “Protect Ohio’s voice!”

The ‘no’ campaign also emulated the ballot language in trying to turn the table on Issue 1, with yard signs and other messaging that proclaimed that a ‘no’ vote would “stop gerrymandering.” Opponents of Issue 1 made the case that it would erase constitutional protections against unfair maps that Ohioans approved in a 2015 referendum, but reform advocates complained that the Republican mapmakers basically ignored those criteria when they last redrew districts in 2022.

Issue 1 would have set up a new, 15-member panel made up of citizens selected from a pool of applicants; the body, tasked with redrawing the state’s maps, would have included five registered Republicans, five registered Democrats, and five people who are neither. 

This system would have broadly resembled similar commissions set up in states like Arizona, California, and Michigan, which adopted new redistricting processes through successful ballot initiatives. Most recently, in 2018, Michigan voters approved a constitutional amendment that set up an independent redistricting commission by an overwhelming majority, with 61 percent of the vote.

Instead, the failure of Ohio’s measure protects the status quo, which grants the authority to draw districts to a panel of elected officials, including the governor and secretary of state, plus appointees of legislative leaders. 

Going into Tuesday, Ohio’s congressional delegation has 10 Republicans and 5 Democrats. The state House is made up of 67 Republicans and 32 Democrats. And the state Senate is made up of 26 Republicans and 7 Democrats. 

These splits mask a deeper asymmetry in the current congressional map: All 10 of the GOP-held congressional districts are considered to be safely Republican, meaning that they pack so many voters who reliably vote for the GOP that Democrats are not expected to be able to compete there. By contrast, three of the five Democratic-held districts are competitive and winnable by the GOP. In fact, Democrats may lose one of the seats they hold on Tuesday, as the 9th District remains too close as of publication.

Issue 1 included a requirement that the state’s congressional and legislative maps closely mirror Ohio’s statewide partisan split. It likely would have resulted in maps that included at least one additional Democratic-leaning congressional seat, and at least a dozen additional Democratic-leaning legislative seats. This would not have guaranteed how each district votes on any election day, but it would have likely changed the composition of the legislature and House delegation. 

Turcer, of Common Cause, said she is not sure yet what comes next for her and other anti-gerrymandering advocates. “We need to regroup and figure out how we’re actually going to get the job done,” she said. “What I do know is that it is going to take time and effort, and we’re gonna have to be really thoughtful and strategic, and that means it’ll take time to figure out what our next steps are.”

But she also stressed she is determined to find a way to constrain gerrymandering to ensure that voters’ partisan preferences are better reflected in Congress and the legislature. “Their goal is to maximize their power, not to actually create fair elections,” she said of the state’s elected officials.

She added, “We all want to participate in meaningful elections. We don’t want to participate in theater.”

The post Ohioans Reject Redistricting Reform, Protecting GOP Gerrymanders appeared first on Bolts.

“I’m in support of any measures that make the process more fair to reflect the will of the people, instead of letting the politicians decide how to gerrymander,” says Kwon.

In the voting booth, he reviewed the text in front of him. His ballot read that voting ‘yes’ would set up a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.” 

So Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration. 

But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo. To bring about the new independent process and remove redistricting from elected officials, as was his intention, he would have had to vote ‘yes.’

Kwon says he got confused by the language that was crafted and placed on the ballot by Republican Ohio officials. The official most directly responsible for this language, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, had a direct hand in drawing the gerrymandered maps that Kwon opposes and that the reform would unwind.

“I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else,” Kwon told me. “They are using the term gerrymandering to describe an attempt to actually fix the gerrymandering.”

He added, “I thought this was a serious document, and that there would be some standard.” Other Ohioans have come forward with similar stories in recent days, complaining they meant to vote ‘yes’ but got tricked by the ballot language into not doing so.

Now the fate of Ohio’s redistricting reform hinges on whether its proponents can dispel this confusion and get the word out to all the residents who intend to support it. 

The result will determine who gets to draw future state congressional and legislative districts, and it may shift seats as early as 2026. But more than that, the dispute adds to a larger saga over the viability of direct democracy in Ohio. Just last summer, the GOP pushed an amendment that would have made it much less likely for future citizen-initiated measures to succeed. That proposal failed, but Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, told me at the time that she expected Republican leaders to “come back and try again” this year. Now she says that’s exactly what they did when they skewed this latest measure’s ballot language. 

Lewis helped organize Issue 1 this year. And just like in the summer of 2023, she said, state officials “are threatened by the idea that the people of Ohio would have power.”

“They have understood that Ohioans don’t want gerrymandering, they have nothing good to say about voting ‘no’,” she said, “so the only thing they can say is, if you vote ‘yes,’ on this, you’re requiring gerrymandering, which is the exact opposite of the truth.”

Issue 1 would amend the state constitution to create a new panel to draw Ohio districts. It would be made up of 15 citizens selected by retired judges from a pool of applicants; the body would need to include five registered Republicans, five registered Democrats, and five people who are neither. Elected officials would be barred from serving on the commission. 

An independent commission would mark a huge change from current law, which grants the authority to draw districts to a panel of elected officials, including the governor, the secretary of state, and appointees of legislative leaders. The constitution already requires that new maps respect certain principles of fairness. But when Ohio’s high court in 2022 struck down GOP gerrymanders seven separate times, ordering the process to be more equitable, GOP leaders ignored the rulings and ran out the clock until they landed a more conservative court in the 2022 midterms. Issue 1 would also codify more stringent fairness criteria for the new commission to respect. 

The coalition that drafted Issue 1 collected enough signatures to put it on the ballot. But as the secretary of state, LaRose got the opportunity to write the measure’s official summary. LaRose had been an active player in the redistricting process that drew the current maps that favor the GOP, but wrote his proposed summary in a way that suggested Issue 1 would make it likelier that Ohio gets gerrymandered. Proponents of Issue 1 immediately complained that his text was misleading. 

They got more angry after LaRose’s draft went up for review in front of the Ohio Ballot Board, a five-person body that includes LaRose and has a GOP majority. During that process, Republican state Senator and board member Theresa Gavarone proposed the specific wording that Kwon says tripped him up most: She suggested using the term “gerrymander” to describe the way Issue 1 would require a commission to divide up the state.

Gavarone’s proposed tweak was met by gasps and startled laughter from the audience. (This can be heard in the recording’s 1:35:20 mark.) State Representative Terrence Upchurch, one of two Democrats on the board, then laughed in bewilderment when given the opportunity to respond to Gavarone. Still, a majority of the board approved LaRose’s draft and Gavarone’s amendment.

Voting rights groups rushed to court, asking for the language to be struck down. But the state supreme court, which has a narrow GOP majority, rebuffed them in September and upheld most of the ballot summary. 

The four Republican justices said it was accurate to say that the new independent commission would “gerrymander” Ohio since it would be tasked with taking partisanship into account, even if it’s to draw a more evenly divided map.

The three Democratic justices disagreed furiously. Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote in a dissent, “We should be requiring a nearly complete redrafting of what is perhaps the most stunningly stilted ballot language that Ohio voters will have ever seen.”

According to Derek Clinger, an Ohio-based lawyer who has litigated past ballot language cases in front of the Ohio Supreme Court, many states use a system like Ohio’s: They ask elected partisan officials to draft ballot summaries. Still, some do it differently. Oregon, for instance, randomly selects citizens to meet and write statements summarizing each ballot measure. 

But what frustrates Clinger is that Ohio’s state constitution does contain “workable standards” that are meant to enable oversight onto the decisions made by state officials; it states that language on the ballot can’t “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters.” Clinger said, “You have this standard, but you had a majority [on the state supreme court] that disregarded that.”

Some Ohio justices take the view that they’re not supposed to play a strong oversight role. Pat DeWine, a Republican justice who is also the son of Ohio’s governor, even has a forthcoming law review essay on the matter. DeWine admits that the Ohio Ballot Board “is composed of partisan actors who may have incentives to draft language that at least subtly favors one side or the other.” But the court should be wary of second guessing them, he writes: It “polices only the outer boundaries of the board’s discretion.” 

Clinger, who now works at the State Democracy Research Initiative, a research hub at the University of Wisconsin Law School, disagrees. He points to a separate dispute that unfolded in Utah this fall: There, Republicans advanced a referendum meant to allow lawmakers to more easily overturn citizen-initiated measures, while also crafting ballot language claiming that their proposal would “strengthen the initiative process.” 

The Utah supreme court voided this measure in September, writing that a referendum must be placed “on the ballot in such words and in such form that the voters are not confused thereby.”

“Despite the partisan implications of the case, the Utah Supreme Court seemed able to assess in good faith whether the ballot language fairly described the proposal,” Clinger said. “The big takeaway for me is that the personnel of the court is so important.”

The composition of Ohio’s supreme court is on the line this fall since the state is holding elections for three of its seven seats. The GOP could expand its majority from 4-3 to 6-1, but Democrats also have an opportunity to flip the court in their favor. 

Neither Gavarone nor LaRose responded to Bolts’ requests for comment for this story. LaRose said in a statement last month that the court’s decision was “a huge win for Ohio voters, who deserve an honest explanation of what they’re being asked to decide.” 

If Issue 1 passes, the state would have to quickly set up a new commission to create new maps by the 2026 midterms. But for now, proponents of the reform are focused on getting the measure across the finish line. 

 A poll conducted this month by YouGov found that support for Issue 1 had a large lead of over 20 percentage points. But the survey did not use the actual language that people are seeing on their ballot; instead, it asked how respondents would vote after telling them that “a ‘yes’ vote would establish a new bipartisan redistricting commission” and “ban partisan gerrymandering.” That’s precisely the explanation that proponents are fretting won’t be on the measure.

“I’m not going to rest easy at all until election results have come in,” Lewis said. She says she is worried about “a lot of confusion and purposeful misinformation” during the campaign, like the incorrect claims by GOP opponents of the measure that law enforcement officers and veterans would not be eligible to be on the redistricting commission, for instance. 

Citizens Not Politicians, the committee running the “yes” campaign, is working to reach voters and explain what the measure actually does. The group launched an ad this fall in which former Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor tells voters that politicians opposed to Issue 1 have “lied” to them. O’Connor, a Republican, voted to strike down GOP gerrymanders in 2022; since leaving office two years ago, she has helped champion Issue 1. 

The committee behind the “no” campaign, Ohio Works, is running ads as well. They have used the same strategy as the Ohio Ballot Board, of trying to associate Issue 1 with gerrymandering. In response to the criticism that some voters feel tricked by this characterization, a spokesperson for Ohio Works has said that, “If people go in and intend to vote for Issue 1, read the ballot language and vote no, they are not confused.” 

But Kwon, the comic book writer, gives this warning to other Ohio voters: “Be careful. When you read the description, they’re going to refer to any attempt to change the current districting as gerrymandering. That’s what really threw me.”

“I would just say that, if you’re voting ‘yes,’ you’re voting to reform the current districting system,” he added.

Kwon feels frustrated that he unintentionally undercut a reform he supports and canceled out his wife’s vote. But together they’ve been burning up their friend network ever since to share word of his misfortune. 

He said, “If me sharing the story prevents somebody from getting tricked like I was, or one or two people from getting tricked, hopefully that will balance it out.”

The post Anti-Gerrymandering Groups Warn That Ohio’s Ballot Language Is Misleading Voters  appeared first on Bolts.

While there are roughly 2,200 prosecutors and sheriffs on the ballot this year, there’s not much at stake in this election for most of these offices because they drew just one single candidate. But Bolts has kept track of other important races for sheriff and DA all year to identify and cover the elections that are poised to make the biggest difference for local policy. During the primaries, we covered critical DA races from Ohio to Texas and sheriff races from Florida to Michigan.

And now the general elections are upon us. Below is Bolts’ guide to 33 prosecutor and sheriff elections next month—and some honorary mentions, too.

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) sheriff

This used to be the office of Joe Arpaio, the far-right strongman who housed detainees at an outdoor camp called Tent City and was convicted of contempt of court for refusing a court order to stop detaining people suspected of being undocumented, only to be pardoned by Donald Trump. Paul Penzone, the Democrat who defeated Arpaio in 2016, resigned from the office earlier this year, and Jerry Sheridan, a former Arpaio deputy, is now trying to win back the office for the GOP.

Sheridan is on the Brady List, a database of law enforcement officers with a history of lying, because a judge found that he lied under oath during a civil rights lawsuit. Sheridan has said he’d bring back some of the most controversial practices from his former boss, Arpaio, including building a new facility like Tent City, which the county tore down in 2017. Tyler Kamp, a former Phoenix police officer who switched parties late last year to run for sheriff as a Democrat, is connecting Sheridan to Arpaio’s record of racial discrimination. 

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor 

Just two years ago, Republican County Attorney Rachel Mitchell narrowly defeated a progressive challenger who ran on curbing the punitive legacy of this office. That was a special election, so Mitchell is already back on the ballot, and this time her challenger has a different message. Tamika Wooten, who ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination, has accused Mitchell of “leniency” toward defendants and faulted her use of diversion programs, The Arizona Republic reports. Wooten’s criticism echoes the attacks made by Mitchell’s primary opponent, who lost by a large margin in August.

On abortion, though, the fault lines in this race align more closely with partisan expectations. When the state supreme court revived an 19 century ban on nearly all abortions this spring, Wooten told Bolts that she would not bring charges under the law, saying, “That is a very serious and personal decision that a person must have with themselves and with their health care provider.” While lawmakers later overturned the 1864 law outlawing virtually all abortion, a ban after 15 weeks remains in place, and Mitchell has refused to rule out prosecuting doctors. She has also fought an effort by the Democratic governor to prevent local prosecutors from charging abortions. 

Arizona | Pima County (Tucson) sheriff

This race erupted in controversy this week after Democratic Sheriff Chris Nanos put challenger Heather Lappin, a Republican who works in the local jail, on forced leave. Nanos alleged that Lappin helped the newsroom Arizona Luminaria, which has long reported on excessive force and inhumane conditions in the Tucson jail, connect with an incarcerated source for pay. Arizona Luminaria has denied that it pays sources, saying it only reimbursed an incarcerated source for costly phone calls from the jail.

Nanos’ leadership over the jail, which has seen a string of deaths during his tenure, has been subject to scrutiny. Moreover, the county board, which is run by Democrats, has for months pressed Nanos for information about sexual assault allegations against a sheriff’s deputy. Nanos and Lappin have largely blamed problems at the office on understaffing, Arizona Luminaria reports. 

The race is unfolding against the backdrop of a GOP ballot measure, on the ballot this fall, that would ramp up the role of sheriffs in patrolling the border. Nanos has steadfastly opposed the measure, and he has said he would not enforce it. He defeated a challenger in the July Democratic primary who argued for tighter relationships with federal immigration authorities. Lappin said during the GOP primary that she supported the measure but has since backtracked.

California | Alameda County (Oakland), and Los Angeles County

Two first-term DAs in California faced near immediate efforts to remove them from office, plus mutinies by staff within their office angered by their reforms. Now each faces a political threat. In Oakland, former civil rights attorney Pam Price won the DA’s office in 2022 on a decarceral platform, and rolled out policies meant to focus on rehabilitation over punishment. But local forces who opposed her election, many of which had just succeeded in ousting San Francisco’s DA next door, quickly organized a recall campaign against her, Bolts reported in August. 

Further south, in Los Angeles, George Gascón made a splash within a day of entering office four years ago, as he rolled out a suite of policies to reduce cash bail and sentencing enhancements. Much like Price, Gascón faced a deluge of controversy and negative press over specific cases that critics said he did not prosecute aggressively enough, and he backtracked on some of his measures, Bolts reported earlier this year. 

Now Gascón faces Nathan Hochman, who is running on bringing back more punitive policies to the office and accuses the incumbent of having “extreme pro-criminal policies,” even as violent crime in Los Angeles is decreasing. Hochman was the GOP nominee for attorney general two years ago, though he is helped in this blue county by the fact that this race is nonpartisan.

California | San Francisco prosecutor

Brooke Jenkins replaced the reform-minded Chesa Boudin as prosecutor in 2022, after Boudin was recalled by voters. As Bolts reported at the time, Jenkins quickly disbanded one of Boudin’s major initiatives, a police accountability unit that had prosecuted killer cops. Jenkins won when she faced voters for the first time two years ago, and is now running for a full term. 

She faces Ryan Khojasteh, a former prosecutor in the office who was hired by Boudin and then promptly fired by Jenkins when she took office. Khojasteh is making the case that Jenkins has gone too far in ramping up punishment for teenagers accused of crimes, proposing a return to more rehabilitative policies. He has criticized her for rolling back diversion programs But he has also tried to distance himself from Boudin and eschew some of his policies. This election is overshadowed by the higher-profile races for mayor and city council, which feature similar debates, and even candidates who are proposing to ramp up policing and arrests on matters like homelessness.

Colorado | Arapahoe County prosecutor, and Douglas County prosecutor

Arapahoe and Douglas, two populous counties south of Denver, have long shared a DA. But as Alex Burness writes in Bolts, come 2025, “similar criminal cases may be met with starkly different responses—depending on which side of [a] new administrative boundary they occur.”

That’s because Colorado recently split its 18th Judicial District in two, separating the liberal Arapahoe County (home to Aurora) from its more conservative neighbor. 

As a result, a reform-minded prosecutor may be coming to suburban Colorado. Democrat Amy Padden is favored over former Republican DA Carol Chambers in Arapahoe County. Padden lost her first DA bid in 2020, when she said she’d work to curb jail terms for low-level offenses and reduce the prosecution of minors as adults. She has kept up these themes this year. “We’re not going to prosecute our way to a safer community,” she told Bolts in July. “The way we reduce crime is to see if there are ways to rehabilitate folks and get them back on their feet.”

Douglas County is likely to head in the opposite direction. The GOP tends to do very well here, so Republican George Brauchler, a former DA with a punitive record, is favored over Democrat Karen Breslin. Brauchler is running on the unusually harsh promise of seeking jail time for anyone who commits any theft, Bolts reported in July. 

Florida | Hillsborough County prosecutor, and prosecutor for Orange and Osceola counties 

Twice since 2022, GOP Governor Ron DeSantis has removed a reform-minded prosecutor from office. The legal battles over whether he had the authority to do this are still ongoing. But the two suspended prosecutors are not waiting for the courts: They’re running to get their jobs back, challenging the people DeSantis appointed to replace them.

In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, Democrat Andrew Warren faces Republican Suzy Lopez, the DeSantis appointee. Lopez quickly rolled back Warren’s policies, Boltshas reported, canceling a reform he had put in place to curb aggressive policing of Black cyclists in Tampa. In the Orlando metro region, in a circuit that combines Orange and Osceola counties, Democrat Monique Worrell faces DeSantis appointee Andrew Bain, who is running as an independent. This race is marred by a legal complaint that the GOP fielded a sham candidate to help Bain.

Complicating both elections, DeSantis may choose to overturn the elections again if Warren and Worrell win, maintaining Lopez and Bain in office no matter the results. He kept that door open in remarks in September, and some Republicans have said they expect it should voters reject his appointees. 

Georgia | Chatham County sheriff

The Savannah jail, long plagued by allegations of neglect and abuse, has become a flashpoint in the race between Republican Sheriff John Wilcher and Democrat Richard Coleman, a local police chief. 

Wilcher’s campaign has received thousands of dollars from jail contractors, including people associated with CorrectHealth, the jail medical provider targeted by a scathing 2019 investigation into treatment at the jail and at the center of a wrongful death lawsuit alleging poor treatment. Wilcher has also stopped in-person visitations, which Coleman says he will restart if elected; such visits can be an important lifeline for people who are detained.

Many other Georgia sheriffs oversee jails with abusive conditions, though they may not be holding competitive races this fall. Clayton County Sheriff Levon Allen, a Democrat who oversees a jail where deaths keep mounting, is unopposed, for instance. 

Georgia | Cobb County sheriff, and Gwinnett County sheriff

When Democrats in 2020 flipped the sheriff’s offices in Cobb and Gwinnett, two large counties in the Atlanta suburbs, it prompted rapid change in immigration policy: The new sheriffs immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to cancel their counties’ participation in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local sheriff’s officers to act as federal immigration agents. 

But Georgia Republicans this year retaliated with a new law that requires sheriffs to apply to join 287(g), and hold people suspected of being undocumented when ICE requests it.

The law shrinks sheriffs’ discretion. But Priyanka Bhatt, an attorney with Project South, an organization that advocates for immigrants’ rights in Georgia, says sheriffs still have room to minimize ICE’s footprint, if they so choose. Even if a sheriff’s office is forced to enter into a 287(g) contract, she told Bolts, it can still refrain from proactively interrogating or arresting immigrants. “The way in which the sheriffs implement 287(g) is under their control,” she said.

The first-term Democratic sheriffs are now running for re-election. Cobb County Sheriff Craig Owens, who has spoken out against the new law and said he wouldn’t devote resources to 287(g), faces Republican David Cavender, who says he’d partner with ICE more closely and has echoed Trump’s rhetoric about the “open southern border.” Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor faces Republican Mike Baker, who has made fewer public statements and who did not respond to Bolts’ request for comment on his views on immigration. 

Georgia | Chatham County prosecutor, and Clarke and Oconee counties prosecutor

The Georgia GOP adopted a law last year that threatens to remove DAs from office if they adopt a policy to not charge certain types of cases, such as abortion or marijuana. Critics denounced the law as an effort to target a swath of new Democratic officials, mainly women of color. To sign the law, Governor Brian Kemp traveled to Savannah, home of DA Shalena Cook Jones, who ran on expanding diversion programs locally and has defended reforms from Kemp’s attacks.

Republicans also signaled that they hoped to use the law to target Deborah Gonzalez, the DA of Clarke County (Athens) and Oconee County, who’d quickly rolled out some reforms such as ending marijuana prosecutions after winning office. 

The new law hasn’t yet been used to remove a DA. But Cook Jones and Gonzalez are now running for second terms, fighting off complaints that they’ve neglected the duties of their office, and saying they would continue their approach. Cook Jones faces Republican Andre Pretorius, with whom she is trading accusations of misconduct. And Gonzalez is facing Kalki Yalamanchili, a former prosecutor who is running as an independent.

Illinois | DeKalb County prosecutor, and Lake County prosecutor

In eliminating the use of cash bail last year, the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act also made prosecutors the gatekeepers of bail reform, Bolts explained this spring. Proponents say they now hope that prosecutors will implement the law in good faith, though some prosecutors have been clear that they’ll do what they can to maximize pretrial detention. 

The debate is playing out in two prosecutor races this fall. In Lake County, a populous suburb just north of Chicago, State’s Attorney Eric Rineheart was one of very few prosecutors who backed ending cash bail. Four years after ousting a GOP incumbent, he faces Republican Mary Cole, who has centered her campaign around her opposition to the Pretrial Fairness Act, saying it endangers public safety. (Data shows that crime has not increased since its implementation.)

West of Chicago, in DeKalb County, GOP State’s Attorney Rick Amato is retiring this year after spending the last few years fighting bail reform. Republican Riley Oncken is continuing Amato’s strategy of blaming Democrats for crime, while Democrat Chuck Rose says the law is working. 

Kansas | Johnson County prosecutor, and Johnson County sheriff

Kansas’ most populous county voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 for the first time since 1916. Sheriff Calvin Hayden, a Republican, did not take it well, and spent the following years amplifying lies about the 2020 results and investigating unfounded allegations of fraud. GOP voters responded by kicking him out in their August primary, which he lost to Doug Bedford, a former undersheriff. 

Bedford is now running against Democrat Byron Roberson, the Prairie Village police chief. In 2010, Roberson shot and killed a woman with a history of mental illness, Susan Stuckey, in her apartment. The local DA’s office declined to prosecute, but the family demanded answers and had to sue to obtain records that raised questions about the police response. As he runs for sheriff, Roberson has said the events made him more aware of a need for mental health professionals to respond to 911 calls. 

The DA who decided to not prosecute Roberson at the time, Republican Steve Howe, is still in office and he has faced more recent accusations of glossing over police shootings; one investigation showed that he provided a false account of a 2018 shooting. This fall, Howe is seeking a new term against Democrat Vanessa Riebli, a former prosecutor in his office.

Riebli narrowly won the Democratic primary over a defense attorney who campaigned on a more progressive platform, while she focused on administrative restructuring like changing how cases are assigned in the office. She is also running on a promise to guard reproductive rights. One question is whether Hayden’s actions stain Howe: The DA has faced criticism within his own party for not speaking up against the sheriff’s endless and baseless investigation into local elections.

Michigan | Macomb County prosecutor

Peter Lucido faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment while he served in the Michigan legislature. After he became Macomb County’s prosecuting attorney in 2021, an investigation found that he had behaved inappropriately toward women working in his new office. 

Lucido, a Republican, now faces Democrat Christina Hines, who has worked as a prosecutor in neighboring counties. In 2021, shortly after Eli Savit became the reform-minded prosecutor of Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Hines joined Savit’s office and helped develop a restorative justice program. Last year, she published an article that defended restorative justice as a rehabilitative tool that also brings more closure for victims. But as she runs in Macomb County, which Trump narrowly carried twice, Hines has distanced herself from some of Savit’s major policies, such as his decision to stop seeking cash bail, Michigan Advance reports.

Even so, CPAC, a prominent conservative conference that Lucido has attended, attacked Hines this summer with a social media ad associating Hines with George Soros, the billionaire whose super PAC has helped liberal prosecutors win office, calling her part of a “radical plan to fundamentally change Michigan, and ultimately our country.” Hines has denied any direct association with Soros, focusing her campaign on Lucido’s ethical issues, from the many allegations against him to his decision to celebrate Confederate General Robert E. Lee. 

Michigan | Oakland County prosecutor, and Ingham County prosecutor

Two counties east of Detroit feature Democratic prosecutors running for second terms. 

The race in Oakland County will be this year’s clearest test for criminal justice reform in Michigan. Karen McDonald, a self-described “progressive prosecutor,” has expanded diversion programs, and she has helped some people who were sentenced to life without parole as children apply for resentencing. Her Republican challenger, Scott Farida, is a former prosecutor who says the office should be harsher toward defendants.

In Ingham County (Lansing), Democrat John Dewane was appointed prosecutor in late 2022 after his predecessor Carol Siemon resigned. Siemon had implemented reforms to reduce incarceration, including limiting firearm possession charges and refusing to seek life without parole for people accused of murder. Dewane rolled back her reforms when he took office.

The county is blue enough that Dewane is the clear favorite to win a full term next month. But the race is still worth watching because of who the GOP nominee is: Norm Shinkle played a starring role in one of the moments where Trump came closest to overturning the 2020 election results. As one of the four members of the State Board of Canvassers that fall, Shinkle refused to certify the results, amplifying Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud. Michigan is intimately familiar with what a law enforcement official willing to entertain election conspiracies can bring: Just an hour west of Lansing, a sheriff has kept investigating the 2020 election. 

New York | Albany County prosecutor

David Soares, a vocal foe of criminal justice reform and the DA of New York’s capital county for two decades, lost in the June Democratic primary to local attorney Lee Kindlon. But he did not concede and he is now mounting a write-in campaign to secure a sixth term.

Bolts reported this summer that Soares has used his bully pulpit to attack a suite of reforms passed by Democrats, most notably the landmark changes to New York’s bail system and a law that raised the age for charging people as adults from 16 to 18. Kindlon is more supportive of the reforms, and he has accused Soares of fearmongering. Albany progressives who back Kindlon say they hope that the election fosters more attention to rehabilitation and diversion efforts, especially for young people. 

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) prosecutor 

Four years ago, Republican Joe Deters held on to this prosecutor’s office after beating Fanon Rucker, a Black Democrat who told Bolts this year that racist messaging against him contributed to his loss. But Deters joined the state supreme court last year, and was replaced as prosecutor by Republican Melissa Powers, who has emulated his rhetoric. She has said that, if she loses, Cincinnati will transform into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” she has called for maximizing prison terms, and she has joined the police union in attacking local judges as “woke”, particularly juvenile court judges that she claims are too lenient. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that a decrease in youth crime belies the fearmongering against judges.

Powers faces Democratic challenger Connie Pillich, a former lawmaker and an unsuccessful candidate for governor. Pillich’s campaign has not focused on proposing criminal justice reforms; as a lawmaker last decade, she sponsored legislation to roll back a reform meant to rule out prison for some nonviolent charges. She has also blamed Powers and prior GOP prosecutors for crime in the county; Democrats have not held this office since the 1930s even as they have taken firm control of the rest of the county government.

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) sheriff

Voters in Cincinnati are also choosing their sheriff. Democrat Charmaine McGuffey is running for re-election in a rematch against her predecessor, Jim Neil. McGuffey ousted Neil in the 2020 Democratic primary in a tense race. McGuffey, who had worked under Neil, alleged that Neil fired her because she’s gay and because she warned about abuse in the jail. She also faulted Neil’s cooperation with ICE and said she’d reduce the overcrowded jail. While the jail population decreased slightly during the pandemic, it still remains well above capacity.

This year, Neil is running as a Republican. He says he wants to resist the “agenda of the Democratic Party” to “not support law enforcement,” and has complained that the county is flying the Pride flag on public buildings. He also says the office could detain still more people, and that it has room to hold immigrants, including by shipping detainees out of the county.

Ohio | Portage County sheriff

Some conservative sheriffs have involved themselves in elections, engaging in yearslong investigations of the 2020 results and setting up task forces to police voting. Enter Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski, who in September drew widespread condemnation when he called on county residents to “write down all the addresses” of people with yard signs for Kamala Harris. 

He made those remarks in a xenophobic social media post that used the term “locust” to describe undocumented immigrants. 

Jon Barber, Zuchowski’s Democratic opponent this fall, denounced the sheriff’s remarks, telling Bolts, “I don’t know how it could be interpreted as anything else but voter intimidation.” Barber also took issue with Zuchowski’s “derogatory” attitude toward immigrants, saying, “I don’t know anyone who’s in the United States who does not have some immigration lineage.” Zuchowski is also facing allegations that he forced people held at his jail to work for his reelection campaign. 

South Carolina | Charleston County prosecutor and sheriff

During her 17-year tenure as Charleston’s prosecutor, Solicitor Scarlett Wilson has faced complaints of widespread racial inequalities. Four years ago, she narrowly beat a Democrat who promised to conduct a “racial audit” of the office to address disparities. But the dynamic in this year’s campaign is very different.

Wilson’s Democratic challenger, David Osborne, is a former prosecutor Wilson demoted in 2021 because he sent an email to a defense attorney mocking the office’s mandatory training on racial equity and unconscious bias, The Post and Courier reports. The defense attorney was representing someone charged during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020; Osborne has since accused Wilson of letting down police and not prosecuting protesters aggressively enough. Still, Thomas Dixon, a pastor and prominent local Black activist who has long denounced Wilson for not holding law enforcement accountable for shootings or in-custody deaths of Black people who die in custody, has said he’d welcome change in the office.

Charleston voters did force some turnover in 2020—just not in the prosecutor’s race. Sheriff Al Cannon, a Republican who’d held the office since 1988, lost to Kristin Graziano, a Democrat. Upon taking office, Graziano immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to reduce collaboration with ICE, terminating the county’s participation in the agency’s 287(g) program and refusing to hold people for ICE without a judicial warrant. Prominent Republicans have since attacked her for not detaining immigrants, using the Trumpian strategy of equating immigration and crime. 

Graziano in November faces Republican Carl Ritchie, who has indicated he’d toughen office policies toward people suspected of being undocumented.

Texas | Harris County (Houston) prosecutor and sheriff

A Democratic primary in March already shook up Houston’s DA office: Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in the office, defeated eight-year incumbent Kim Ogg. When a 2017 court ruling held that local bail policies were unconstitutional because defendants were routinely jailed simply for being poor, local officials reformed how the county handles pretrial detention for misdemeanors, but Ogg strongly opposed those changes. Teare defended bail reform while challenging Ogg, and he told Bolts that Ogg had created a “culture of fear” in her office that made her staff overcharge some cases and remain too reliant on pretrial detention.

Now Teare faces Republican Dan Simons, another former prosecutor in the DA’s office who, like Ogg, is accusing misdemeanor bail reform of endangering public safety and misrepresenting the changes in bail policy that followed the court ruling. During his time at the office, some coworkers questioned Simons’ ethics, Houston Landing reported, with one junior prosecutor claiming he told her to lie to a defense attorney to force a plea deal. Democrats have grown stronger in Harris County in recent years, and are now generally favored to win, but some countywide races have remained tight.

If he wins the DA’s office, Teare could have an ally in Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat who embraced the bail changes and some other reforms, but who is also overseeing jails that are rife with abuse and deaths. Gonzalez is also up for reelection this year, facing Mike Knox, a former Houston police officer who wants to ramp up policing and join ICE’s 287(g) program, which Gonzalez left in 2017. 

Texas | Travis County (Austin) prosecutor

Another reform-minded prosecutor won in Texas’ March primaries. Travis County DA José Garza beat an expensive challenge funded by tech interests and Elon Musk backing attorney Jeremy Sylestine, who made the case that Garza’s policies were endangering Austin. “We scored a major victory for our progressive movement and for criminal justice reform,” Garza said on election night. Garza now faces Republican Daniel Betts, who is campaigning on a similar message as Sylvestine. Travis County is a lot bluer than Harris County, making any race there an uphill climb for the GOP. 

Garza, who has been a foil of Texas GOP officials, also faced a separate effort to toss him from office this year when a county resident filed a legal complaint against him, taking advantage of a new state law providing for the removal of prosecutors who refuse to prosecute certain charges. A GOP prosecutor assigned to investigate the complaint recommended that it not move forward this summer, though a local judge has still kept the case alive.  

Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) sheriff

Fort Worth’s local jail has seen a surge of deaths during the tenure of Sheriff Bill Waybourn. Local organizers have long been demanding an investigation into Waybourn’s practices and accountability over the deaths, and Bolts reported this week that he appears to be flouting a state law dictating oversight, sparking the attention of the state agency that regulates jails.

Waybourn has also ramped up immigration enforcement and helped set up a county task force to police elections.  

Waybourn, who is a Republican, is facing Democratic challenger Patrick Moses, who accused the sheriff during a public forum earlier this year of “neglecting the people that are dying in the jail,” Bolts reported. Tarrant County, one of the nation’s largest jurisdictions, has historically voted Republican but grown more competitive in recent years—a political shift that itself has fueled far-right conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Washington | Pierce County (Tacoma) sheriff 

The 2021 death of Matthew Ellis, a Black man who was hog-tied by the Tacoma police and a Pierce county sheriff’s deputy, sparked a state investigation into local law enforcement and led to the passage of a ban on hog-tying this year. Even as he faced scrutiny, Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer stood by the practice and was the only sheriff to defend it to the attorney general. Troyer also faced a scandal within months of taking office in 2020 for calling the police on a Black newspaper carrier, sparking reform calls from state Democrats. 

Troyer is retiring this year, and two candidates hope to replace him. Keith Swank, a former Seattle police officer, is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2022 on a platform of cracking down on immigration and blaming crime on “anti-police activists.” Patti Jackson, who currently works in the sheriff’s office, is endorsed by local Democrats and says she’d pursue “progressive initiatives” to address the “root causes” of crime. She’s also touting Troyer’s endorsement.

Leslie Cushman, an advocate with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, a group that helped champion the ban on police hog-tying, told Bolts she’ll demand reforms from whoever wins, including pushing for deescalation policies, changing how mental health calls are handled, and barring police traffic stops for minor infractions—a reform other jurisdictions are considering this election.

And the list goes on | Some honorary mentions

Chicago is poised to elect Eileen O’Neill Burke as its new prosecutor after she squeaked out a close Democratic primary win and is now heavily favored in the overwhelmingly blue Cook County. It’s the same dynamic in Ohio’s blue Franklin County, home to Columbus, where Democrat Shayla Favor, who won a tight Democratic primary for prosecutor campaigning on what she called a “progressive vision for public safety,” now faces Republican John Rutan, who shares conspiracy theories about elections and 9/11 and has been disowned by the local GOP. 

In another blue county, Atlanta DA Fani Willis is poised to win re-election; she’s still prosecuting Trump while running against one of his former lawyers, Courtney Kramer. 

Savit, the prosecutor in Ann Arbor, is running for re-election unopposed and he is bound to gain a new ally: Alyshia Dyer, a social worker, who won a tight primary to become the next sheriff of Washtenaw County. Bolts reported that Dyer has put forth a progressive platform, including ending low-level traffic stops, and she is now unopposed in the general election. Other unopposed candidates include Dar Leaf, a far-right Michigan sheriff in Barry County, Michigan, who has kept investigating the 2020 election, and Greg Tony, the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, who rolled back a reform shortly after being appointed to the office by DeSantis.

Elsewhere still, Miami is electing a sheriff for the first time in decades. In Clay County, Florida, a sheriff who was ousted in 2020 after allegations that he wrongfully detained a mistress—he was later acquitted— is attempting a comeback. In Wisconsin’s swing Kenosha County, the site of the Black Lives Matter protests during which Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in 2020, the deputy DA (Democrat Carli McNeill) who authored the criminal complaint against Rittenhouse faces Republican Xavier Solis, an attorney who represented a foundation that raised money for his legal defense. 

Bolts is also watching prosecutor races that could be competitive in Florida’s Palm Beach County, New York’s Westchester County, New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County, and Texas’ El Paso County, as well as sheriffs races in Genesee County (Flint), Michigan and San Francisco.

The post The 33 Prosecutor and Sheriff Elections that Matter to Criminal Justice in November appeared first on Bolts.

“We don’t invite these type of crimes in our community,” O’Malley told cleveland.com at the end of 2019. “But when they happen, the citizens of our community have made clear that they want the option [of capital punishment].” 

But O’Malley says his position on the death penalty has changed since then, and his office hasn’t produced a new death sentence since around the time he made headlines for his zealousness for the punishment. In recent months, while campaigning for his third term in office against a progressive challenger, O’Malley has said he would limit his use of the death penalty. 

“My feelings have certainly evolved; I do a lot of self-reflection as the prosecutor,” he said during a debate moderated by the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association in February. “But I can tell you this: If we have a mass shooting with mass casualties? My guess is you’d probably see it again.” 

O’Malley, however, still uses the threat of this punishment to win plea deals. In November of last year, his office filed and then dropped capital murder charges against a man who pleaded to life in prison. 

O’Malley’s local critics have denounced his resistance to examining wrongful convictions, amid unrest and dysfunction in his office’s unit that’s meant to assess innocence claims. O’Malley has contested prisoners’ attempts to prove their innocence and has opposed new trials for at least two men on death row despite evidence of their innocence; one of those men, Melvin Bonnell, has a pending execution date. In several cases, he retried people despite evidence showing they were not responsible for the crimes that sent them to prison. In another, he fought against compensation for a man who wrongfully spent decades on death row. 

“There is a pattern of stonewalling the grant of relief in innocence cases, rather than fulfilling the prosecution’s duty to do justice,” said Robert Dunham, a death penalty attorney and former executive director of the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center. “If Michael O’Malley has had a change of heart and is rethinking his approach to death penalty cases, one of the most important things to do would be to take a look at the cases that are already in the system.”

O’Malley’s evolution on the death penalty occurred during a pause in executions in Ohio that has stretched on for more than five years due to shortages of lethal injection drugs and reprieves granted by Republican Governor Mike DeWine. His shift also follows support for the death penalty dipping to record lows within his own party. 

But the possibility that executions may resume looms over the state. The state has executions scheduled as soon as October and December this year. And Republican lawmakers are attempting to restart executions in Ohio with legislation that would authorize the use of nitrogen to suffocate prisoners to death, a method first used by Alabama in January. If Ohio’s unofficial moratorium were to end, prosecuting attorneys in the state would play a critical role in which executions proceed, as they’d be responsible for requesting execution dates in the state. 

Twenty-two prisoners from Cuyahoga County are awaiting execution, about a fifth of all people on Ohio’s death row. Four people from the county are already scheduled for execution through 2027.

Bolts sent O’Malley a list of detailed questions about his approach to the death penalty and wrongful convictions. A spokesperson wrote in an email that he was unavailable until April, after his primary election, and encouraged Bolts to talk with him then. 

O’Malley’s challenger in the March 19 Democratic primary is Matthew Ahn, a former public defender and visiting professor at Cleveland State University of Law who told Bolts he would never seek the death penalty, citing data showing that it does not reduce murder rates and costs taxpayers more money than sentencing someone to life in prison. 

Ahn also criticized O’Malley’s office over what he calls a history of ignoring evidence of wrongful convictions. “An office that doesn’t take wrongful convictions seriously is not an office that’s built for justice,” Ahn said. 

O’Malley’s critics point to the case of Anthony Apanovitch, who was freed from death row six months before O’Malley took over in 2016 after DNA evidence led a judge to overturn his conviction of raping and murdering 33-year-old Mary Ann Flynn in 1984, and order a new trial. 

Former Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty had challenged the judge’s decision, arguing that Apanovitch should not have been freed because of a procedural mistake; under Ohio law, the defense has to request DNA testing in order for it to be used in a post-conviction appeal, but in Apanovitch’s case, prosecutors had secretly ordered the testing without his lawyers’ knowledge. The Ohio Supreme Court agreed with prosecutors and in 2018 Apanovitch was sent back to death row, more than two years after lower courts had freed him; in its opinion, the court acknowledged that its decision might seem “unduly formalistic or unfair.” After he was elected prosecutor, O’Malley continued to oppose Apanovitch’s efforts to win a new trial, arguing that he doesn’t think Apanovitch is innocent.  

Apanovitch’s lawyers say that he should be retried so a jury can properly consider two key pieces of DNA evidence in the case: a swab taken from Flynn’s mouth and another taken from her vagina. Once the defense found out about the state’s testing, they ordered their own. A defense expert found that the swab taken from Flynn’s vagina contained DNA that did not belong to Apanovitch, an assertion that the state’s expert has not contested and formed the basis for his 2016 release. While the state claimed the other swab, from Flynn’s mouth, contained DNA fitting Apanovitch’s profile, a defense expert said it did not in fact show Flynn’s DNA—raising questions about whether it was contaminated and came from Flynn in the first place. O’Malley has cited the oral swab as evidence of Apanovitch’s guilt and opposed bringing it back into court for further scrutiny.

Apanovitch has exhausted his appeals at the state level and his case is now in federal court. Dale Baich, a former federal public defender who has represented Apanovitch since 1991, said O’Malley could still take action by filing a motion asking for the case to be retried. He could also move to vacate the conviction. 

“He has the discretion and the authority to go into court to correct this injustice,” Baich told Bolts. 

When asked about the case, Ahn, O’Malley’s challenger in the March 19 primary, declined to comment, saying that it would be inappropriate to speak on specific cases. 

In another case, O’Malley argued that Joseph D’Ambrosio, who spent two decades on death row, was not wrongfully convicted despite a judge finding that prosecutors hid exonerating evidence that contradicted their narrative and withheld information showing that key witnesses were unreliable. D’Ambrosio had sued Ohio for wrongful imprisonment and sought compensation for his time behind bars after a judge overturned his conviction and death sentence in 2010. But O’Malley stood in the way of D’Ambrosio winning compensation by opposing his claim that he was wrongfully convicted until the Ohio Attorney General’s Office asked him to drop it. Even then, O’Malley maintained that he should not be compensated. “Should people who are not innocent get money?” he told the Associated Press in June 2021. Two months later, the state ultimately agreed to pay D’Ambrosio $1 million. 

As of 2021, Cuyahoga County had sent six people to death row who were later exonerated; only Cook County (Chicago) and Philadelphia County have seen more death row exonerations. Thirty-four more people have been found to be wrongfully convicted in Cuyahoga County since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. 

Making it more difficult for people to prove their innocence, the conviction integrity unit in O’Malley’s office in charge of investigating those claims has been accused of failing to properly review cases. 

Ron Adrine, a retired judge, began working with the unit in 2018 as a member of an independent five-member advisory board that was tasked with reviewing cases and making recommendations for which needed action from prosecutors. Adrine said he came out of retirement to join that board because he thought it would be a good opportunity to reverse injustices. He expected that it would meet regularly to decide when problematic convictions needed attention from prosecutors. 

“What happened though, was that we did not meet regularly,” Adrine told Bolts. “And when we did meet, we only reviewed a very few number of cases.” 

According to Adrine, the board reviewed less than 10 cases during his first two years on it and did not convene or analyze a single case from 2020 to 2022. In November 2022, Adrine plus the other four members of the conviction integrity unit’s external board all resigned, writing in a letter to O’Malley that they were troubled by the unit’s inactivity. They wrote that an internal panel at the prosecutor’s office responsible for first examining cases then deciding whether to funnel them to the advisory board had not met in two years. 

“We are forced to conclude that the [conviction integrity unit] does not function in the manner we anticipated when we agreed to serve,” read the letter.

Even when the external panel that Adrine sat on had the opportunity to work on a case, O’Malley’s office did not always listen to its recommendation. For example, Adrine and his colleagues spent 14 months investigating the case of Octavius Williams, who was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2011. They found that Williams’ brother confessed to the crime numerous times and recommended a full exoneration. 

But O’Malley disagreed and refused to declare Williams innocent. “I think in this particular case, we did the best we could. I think we did what was right… I’ve also learned that there is a growth industry of attorneys who are trying to harvest wrongful conviction claims,” Adrine told Cleveland Scene in 2020. 

O’Malley agreed to allow Williams out on supervised release while awaiting the outcome of his appeal, yet he still fought to send him back to prison. Last month, a state appellate court vacated Williams’ conviction and ordered a new trial. Judge Kathleen Ann Keough wrote that the evidence clearing Williams was so overwhelming that O’Malley should not seek to convict him again. 

O’Malley hasn’t publicly stated whether he intends to retry Williams. To date, he has retried at least three men whose convictions were vacated because of exonerating evidence, Isaiah Andrews, Kenny Phillips, and Mark Sutton. All three were then acquitted during their retrials. 

Adrine said that even when his panel flagged evidence that made them question a conviction, prosecutors still sometimes failed to share that information with defendants. “There were cases where we thought that there was some exculpatory evidence, it should have been given to defense counsel, and it appeared that there was some failure to get that evidence into the proper hands in a timely fashion,” he said. 

Asked whether prosecutors were hiding exculpatory evidence that his panel flagged from people who are still in prison, Adrine said he was not permitted to disclose more details about his work for the office. “I can only say to you, that we were concerned about that as an issue,” he said. 

On the campaign trail, Ahn has accused O’Malley of dismantling the conviction integrity unit. If elected, he plans to bring back to the external board and add a formerly incarcerated person as a member. In response, O’Malley has said the unit is operating effectively. At a debate last month, he claimed his office is more effective in helping people overturn wrongful convictions than the Ohio Innocence Project, an initiative powered by lawyers working at the University of Cincinnati.

Mark Godsey, director of the Ohio Innocence Project, disputed that claim and slammed O’Malley’s history on handling innocence cases. The Ohio Innocence Project represented Andrews and Sutton, two of the men whom O’Malley unsuccessfully prosecuted again after their exoneration. “They turned into family,” Sutton has said of the organization. 

“On wrongful convictions, O’Malley started off strong, but then went downhill quickly,” Godsey, who’s also a professor of law at the University of Cincinnati, told Bolts. “There are prosecutors in that office who are trying to do the right thing, but it seems like O’Malley himself is not one of them.”

The winner of the Democratic primary will face Republican candidate Anthony Alto in November, though Cuyahoga County leans heavily Democratic. In January, the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party declined to endorse O’Malley or Ahn at a party meeting, which local media described as a snub for the incumbent. 

O’Malley has received an endorsement from state Senator Nickie Antonio, a Democrat who is sponsoring a bill to abolish the death penalty in Ohio. The legislation, currently in committee, also has several Republican sponsors, and Antonio is optimistic about its chances. She says the effort to end capital punishment has become more urgent with the looming nitrogen bill. 

Antonio told Bolts she has spoken with O’Malley about showing restraint with the death penalty. “He definitely hears from me when I disagree with something,” she said. “I’m going to keep working on trying to get him to really shift his opinion on the death penalty for sure.”

The post In Cleveland Prosecutor’s Office, a Long Trail of Death Sentences and Wrongful Convictions appeared first on Bolts.

When a coalition of voting rights activists in Ohio set out last December to introduce a new ballot initiative to expand voting access, they hardly anticipated that the thing to stop them would be a matter of word choice.

But that’s what Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost took issue with when he reviewed the proposal’s summary language and title, then called “Secure and Fair Elections.” Among other issues, Yost said the title “does not fairly or truthfully summarize or describe the actual content of the proposed amendment.” 

So the group tried again, this time naming their measure “The Ohio Voters Bill of Rights.” Again, Yost rejected them, for the same issue, with the same explanation. After that, activists sued to try and certify their proposal—the first step on the long road toward putting the measure in front of voters on the ballot. 

“AG Yost doesn’t have the authority to comment on our proposed title, let alone the authority to reject our petition altogether based on the title alone,” the group said in a statement announcing their plans to mount a legal challenge. “The latest rejection of our proposed ballot summary from AG Yost’s office is nothing but a shameful abuse of power to stymie the right of Ohio citizens to propose amendments to the Ohio Constitution.”

These Ohio advocates aren’t alone in their struggle to actually use the levers of direct democracy. Already in 2024, several citizen-led attempts to put issues directly to voters are hitting bureaucratic roadblocks early on in the process at the hands of state officials. 

Arkansas organizers have been stonewalled by their attorney general, who has rejected language for ballot proposals to expand medical marijuana and increase government transparency. In Nebraska, a lawmaker behind a law sending more public money to private schools has leaned on the secretary of state to block a ballot referendum attempting to repeal it. 

Abortion rights measures have been under particular scrutiny. Missourians attempting to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution were delayed from gathering signatures for months as state officials fought over the specifics of the ballot measure. Advocates in Montana are still fighting to get their proposal for abortion rights approved for signature gathering after the state’s attorney general rejected it in January. Meanwhile, observers across the South are waiting with bated breath for the Florida Supreme Court to decide the fate of a proposed abortion rights initiative, which could decide whether abortion remains legally available in the region; Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody asked the court to block the proposal, saying that the language is too confusing for voters to understand. 

Ostensibly, these proposals are being rejected over technicalities; a problem with a ballot title, or unclear language in the proposal. But in practice, advocates argue, the state officials reviewing these proposals are blurring the lines between procedural and political. They claim these officials are overstepping the bounds of their discretion to reject ballot initiatives based on their opposition to the underlying issue and not the quality of the petition.

“We have never seen the Ohio AG try to broaden their authority to allow them to determine whether a title is permissible,” explained Emma Olson Sharkey, an attorney specializing in ballot initiatives at Elias Law Group, one of the firms leading the suit against Yost, the Ohio attorney general. “This is clearly, from my perspective, an overreach of authority, and we are seeing similar efforts with conservative officials across the country.” 

National observers say this is an escalation of an ongoing effort by leaders of mostly conservative state governments to thwart direct democracy. Bureaucratic backlash to citizen-led ballot initiatives has become a pattern in some red states. Arkansas’ Republican-run legislature last year pushed through new rules raising the signature-gathering requirements, just a few years after voters rejected those same changes. Last August, Ohio voters similarly rejected a proposal put forth by state Republicans to increase the threshold needed for measures to pass.

“It’s all part of this larger puzzle of who gets a say and who gets to participate in our democracy, and where things are popular among constituents but that does not align with whoever is in political power in that state,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which tracks ballot measures around the country.

A rejection from a state official doesn’t necessarily spell certain death for a citizen-led initiative, because organizers typically have opportunities to correct problems and resubmit. But advocates for direct democracy say the long delays caused by fighting with an attorney general over the language of a ballot proposal wastes legal resources and precious time needed to collect signatures and connect with voters. In this way, even if state officials can’t kill proposals outright, then perhaps by a thousand cuts.

In the just over half of states that allow for citizen-led ballot initiatives or referendums, each one has different rules governing the process. In Michigan, a proposal is submitted to the secretary of state before signature gathering, and language is reviewed by the state Board of Canvassers. Illinois has next to no pre-approval process at all for a petition to make it onto the ballot. In Florida, by contrast, ballot title and summary language must be approved by the secretary of state, the attorney general and the state supreme court. 

In evaluating these petitions for inclusion on the ballot, these state officials are typically empowered to conduct a review of the petition’s formatting, language, and adherence to state and federal laws. This may mean an attorney general or lieutenant governor making sure that a petition only applies to one subject, or that the language of a summary is easy to understand. These officials don’t have the authority to review the underlying issue a petition is about. And yet, in recent years, some of them seem to be pushing the boundaries of their clerical duties. 

“It really should be more mechanical power to certify this and neutrally evaluate it,” explained Quinn Yeargain, a professor of state constitutional law at Widener University and frequent Bolts contributor. “They’re putting a thumb on the scale and pushing, I think, to expand the understanding of their power.”

David Couch, an Arkansas attorney who has spearheaded various ballot proposals for years, claims the state’s attorney tried to undercut organizers’ attempts to increase government transparency by repeatedly rejecting their proposed language for ballot measures. Couch worked with a coalition called Arkansas Citizens for Transparency last year to introduce a pair of initiatives aimed at amending the state constitution and creating a new state law to guarantee the right to access public information. The ballot initiatives were first submitted to Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin in November of last year, but he rejected one of them, on the grounds that the popular name and ballot title, “The Arkansas Government Transparency Amendment,” was not sufficiently specific.

The group resubmitted the amendment in December, offering four different options for ballot titles and other changes to the text, but the proposal was again rejected. They made a third submission in January, but before Griffin could issue a decision, Couch sued the attorney general in state court over the previous rejections. 

“In my opinion, he was using his statutory authority, which is very limited, to make us rewrite the amendment and rewrite the act to weaken it, and to make it be more what he would like it to be rather than what we the people would want it to be,” Couch told Bolts.

Griffin has maintained that his rejections remained within his authority, and stated in his first opinion from December that his “decision to certify or reject a popular name and ballot title is unrelated to my view of the proposed measure’s merits.” Even so, later on in the opinion, Griffin wrote that he took issue with the word “transparency” in the ballot title, saying it had “partisan coloring” and “seems more designed to persuade than inform.” 

Griffin eventually accepted both proposals, though not before one more rejection, and Couch dropped the lawsuit—not because he had a change of heart, he says, but because the coalition had already lost too much signature-gathering time. Organizers now have until July 5 to gather 90,000 signatures from voters in at least 15 counties to get the issue on the November ballot. (That threshold would be even higher under the bill Arkansas passed last year, but it’s currently held up by a different lawsuit heading toward the high court.)

“They use it to run the clock up. You lose a month every time you have to change something,” Couch said. “What he did was just wrong. It’s unconstitutional.” 

In Missouri, abortion rights organizers have engaged in a nearly year-long battle with the state over a proposal to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and override the state’s near-total abortion ban. 

After the group, Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, submitted 11 different options for an amendment proposal back in March, there was a protracted legal fight with Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican. Bailey tried to force a fiscal impact statement onto the measure claiming it would cost taxpayers billions of dollars (the state auditor, who is tasked with such assessments, had initially determined the state would see “no costs or savings”). 

Once the state supreme court rejected the attorney general’s attempts to inflate the cost of the amendment, the proposal moved on to Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who was tasked with writing 100-word summaries of each option submitted. Organizers accused him of using misleading and partisan language to describe six of the proposals, and the courts ultimately agreed with them after they sued; in an Oct. 31 ruling, a state appeals court said that Ashcroft’s ballot summaries were “replete with politically partisan language,” and ordered him to use the more neutral summaries written by a lower court. Ashcroft tried to appeal the decision to the state supreme court, but they refused to take up the case. 

By the time the dust settled from all this legal back and forth and Missourians for Constitutional Freedom embarked on their formal signature-gathering campaign, it was already January, eleven months since they first submitted their proposal. They now have until May 5 to gather more than 170,000 signatures to get it on the November ballot. One observer with experience running petition campaigns described the experience to The Missouri Independent as “going downhill at a very fast rate of speed.” 

In Montana, a group backing a similar abortion rights measure, Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights, is still stuck in limbo. After state Attorney General Austin Knudsen, a Republican, rejected their measure for not adhering to the single-issue rule, the group quickly petitioned the Montana Supreme Court to overturn the decision, claiming that Knusden overstepped his bounds. They have some precedent on their side—the supreme court in November reversed a similar decision from the attorney general, after he invalidated a ballot measure to reform election rules to create a top-four primary. 

“We were prepared for the fact that it was likely [Knudsen] would try to block the ballot measure and try and take up more time,” said Martha Fuller, president of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Montana, one of the groups in/leading the coalition. But Fuller says they’re not letting this delay kill their organizing momentum. 

“I feel really confident in our ability to gather the number of signatures even on a tighter time frame than we are now,” she said. “Every day we’re hearing from folks who are ready to go; we’re already feeling a sense of momentum building around this measure.”

As organizers fight to get their initiatives on the ballot, they also face broader conflicts around citizen-led ballot measures. Lawmakers around the country have continued to tinker with rules governing nearly every step of ballot initiative processes. While voters in Ohio and Arkansas have rejected state attempts to move the goalposts for ballot initiatives, in others states officials have forced those changes; an analysis by Ballotpedia of legislative changes made to the initiative and referendum process between 2018 and 2023 found that roughly 20 percent of all the legislation passed made the processes more difficult.

And the changes keep coming: Just last week, Republicans in the Missouri legislature advanced two different bills that would make it harder for initiatives to pass. One passed by the Senate would require that a proposal receive majority support in five of the state’s eight congressional districts to pass, in addition to a simple majority of voters statewide. The other, which just passed in the House, would add stricter requirements for the signature gathering process. 

“There’s a constant pushback from conservatives to try to stop these measures in their tracks,” said Olson Sharkey from Elias Law Group. “Because they know, especially with reproductive rights, if these measures get on the ballot, they’re going to win” 

Olson Sharkey sees these tactics coming out of conservatives’ playbook, but conservatives aren’t the only ones deploying them. As Bolts has reported, the Democratic city government of Atlanta changed the rules for popular initiatives in an effort to block a proposed referendum against the ‘Cop City’ police training center; the city council earlier this month went as far as to approve the controversial practice of signature matching to disqualify some people who signed the petition. 

For Fields Figueredo, who tracks ballot initiatives across the country, no matter who’s responsible, chipping away at ballot initiatives betrays a disregard for the fundamental principles of democracy.

“It’s ultimately about minority rule,” she said. “We could elect people in a democratic process, and also they are not actually listening to the will of the people.” 

The post Red State AGs Keep Trying to Kill Ballot Measures by a Thousand Cuts appeared first on Bolts.

Dennis Watkins, the prosecuting attorney of Ohio’s Trumbull County, sparked national outrage last month when he pursued criminal charges against Brittany Watts, a woman who miscarried at home and was then dragged into court when a nurse called the police on her. A grand jury declined to indict Watts last week, but reproductive rights advocates stress that Watkins’ choice to pursue the case reflects an escalating policing of pregnancies nationwide, fueled by local prosecutors’ power to target women who lose a pregnancy.

The controversy unfolded in the run-up to Ohio’s late December filing deadline to run for prosecutor in 2024. There was a brief opportunity for the state’s upcoming elections to test whether local prosecutors would commit to respecting the will of voters on reproductive rights. Residents of Trumbull County had just voted in November to protect abortion rights, approving a statewide measure known as Issue 1 by a margin of 14 percentage points. Its proponents blasted Watkins for betraying the measure’s “spirit and letter” in going after Watts (Issue 1 enshrined a “right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” in the state’s constitution). 

But then the December filing deadline came and went, putting an immediate lid on that prospect. 

No one filed to run against Watkins, who is virtually guaranteed to secure an 11th four-year term in November without needing to explain his actions to voters. (The deadline passed for people running as party candidates but independents can still file by March, though they rarely win such races in Ohio.) 

In fact, Watkins has never faced a challenger in any of his other nine reelection bids since 1984. Over his time as prosecutor, he has fought to keep people with mental illness on death row, and in 2019, he defended a prosecutor in his office who frequently mocked defendants with crude public jokes, dismissing ethics concerns.

It’s the same scene around the state. Only 15 of Ohio’s 88 prosecutor elections this year drew multiple candidates by the December deadline, according to Bolts’ compilation in each county. This means that the vast majority of the state’s prosecuting attorneys are running unopposed this year; Bolts has confirmed that no more than one candidate has filed to run in 73 of the 88 counties. 

Like Watkins, many of these prosecutors oversee offices that have faced misconduct allegations but have suffered no consequences from state officials. A recent investigation by multiple news organizations showed how failures by state agencies have allowed prosecutors across Ohio to get away with breaking the law to win convictions. The investigation detailed how one staff prosecutor repeatedly violated defendants’ rights while working for three Ohio counties over the last two decades but continued to be employed. In each of these three counties, the incumbent prosecuting attorneys—Lucas County’s Julia Bates, a Democrat, Ottawa County’s James VanEerten, a Republican, and Wood County’s Paul Dobson, also a Republican—are running unopposed this year.

When there’s a lack of top-down oversight, elections can offer an alternative mechanism of accountability, forcing officials to defend their actions and create some path for an official’s removal. But that all hinges on people actually running.

Fanon Rucker, an attorney who unsuccessfully ran for Hamilton County prosecutor in 2020, referenced many prosecutors’ failure to even set up conviction integrity units to investigate possible errors and correct wrongful convictions despite the misconduct allegations they face. “If a person is running unopposed and doesn’t feel like that’s a priority, then who’s going to hold their feet to the fire?” he asked. “Who’s going to speak to the community to have them unelected if they don’t take on those types of projects? “

To be sure, Ohio’s most populous counties are more likely to see contested prosecutor elections this year. 

Unlike in 2020, each of Ohio’s three largest counties have more than one candidate filed for the race. In Franklin County (Columbus), the incumbent’s retirement has triggered a four-way race, with the winner of the Democratic primary likely favored to take the job. In Hamilton County (Cincinnati), Republican Prosecuting Attorney Melissa Powers faces Democrat Connie Pillich, a former state lawmaker. And in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), progressive law professor and former public defender Matthew Ahn is challenging Democratic incumbent Michael O’Malley in the March primary.

Still, the lack of candidates is in no way constrained to smaller rural counties. Of the 27 counties with more than 100,000 residents in Ohio, 70 percent drew just one candidate. Watkins’ Trumbull County, southeast of Cleveland, has 200,000 residents. Bolts’ analysis shows the majority of Ohio’s population lives in counties with uncontested races.

Four years ago, even O’Malley ran unopposed in Cleveland. Ahn, who is challenging him this year, says he was shocked at the time to see the race was uncontested, especially given the punitive turn O’Malley’s took during his first term. “We saw a drastic increase in the number of children tried as adults, we saw the county issue more death sentences than any other county in the United States, and so I was really interested in who was going to challenge O’Malley in 2020,” Ahn told Bolts. “The answer to that question ended up being nobody.”

Ahn tried gauging local acquaintances’ interest in challenging O’Malley this year. “By and large, the most common response was, ‘I’m not challenging the machine,’ or ‘Nobody can beat the machine,’” he said. “After hearing this over and over again, I thought it was unacceptable for O’Malley to go uncontested two cycles in a row.” 

In running, Ahn says he’s at least forcing a public debate about local criminal legal policies. “I thought that just even having this conversation is a public good for the voters of Cuyahoga County, for us to think about how we can actually promote public safety,” he said. His campaign blocked O’Malley from securing the local Democratic Party’s endorsement at a convention this month.

It’s unusual enough for any candidate to challenge an incumbent prosecutor in Ohio. It’s even rarer for one to do so while proposing criminal justice reforms—like Ahn, who promises for instance to never seek the death penalty and reduce adult prosecutions of minors.

Prosecuting attorneys tend to vocally fight reform proposals regardless of their party, which has occasionally clashed with the politics of Ohio’s GOP-run legislature. Some Republican state lawmakers have teamed up with Democrats to introduce major reform legislation, but these bills typically run into a bipartisan wall of opposition from prosecutors.

In 2021, for instance, Republican Governor Mike DeWine signed a bipartisan bill that limited the use of the death penalty against individuals with mental illness. Prosecutors from both parties, including Cuyahoga County’s O’Malley, fought the bill’s passage. The same year, Ohio also adopted a bipartisan bill that abolished life sentences without the possibility of parole for minors, over the opposition of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, an organization that lobbies lawmakers on behalf of the state’s 88 prosecuting attorneys. 

“They’re pretty much in lockstep, they’re pretty much in unison,” said Kevin Werner, who supported that death penalty bill as policy director at the Ohio Justice & Policy Center, an organization that advocates for criminal justice reforms. He says prosecutors from both parties band together regardless of who supports a reform proposal. “If it’s a bill that intends to increase the penalty, or increase the duration that a person could be sentenced to incarceration, they’re in favor of it,” Werner told Bolts. “If it’s a bill that rolls back any of those kinds of things, they’re opposed to it as sure as the sun will rise.”

“They’re often trying to change the standards of proof, making it easier to secure a conviction,” he said. “They want to make their jobs easier.”

Elsewhere in the nation, victories by reform-minded candidates have changed this dynamic and led to policy disagreements among prosecutors. Ohio is far from that, but Ahn hopes to break the mold of the typical prosecutor. He thinks his background as a former public defender gives him a “different experience and a different perspective on the justice system” than voters usually hear from prosecutor candidates.

“There still is this political assumption that, in order to win, you have to be 90s-style ‘tough on crime’ elected officials,” Ahn said. “What I’m finding in my conversations with folks across the county is that’s not necessarily true. But for folks who come up within prosecutor’s offices and then themselves run for prosecutor, these assumptions are often still accepted as a fact.”

Rucker says his 2020 run for prosecutor in Hamilton County, a metro area that includes Cincinnati, was a lesson in how bruising local elections can be. 

“This is the single most powerful position in the county because of the discretion, because of the influence, because of the relationships,” Rucker said. “You have to raise a lot of money, and you have to have an equal amount of influence and authority as the incumbent that you’re running against.”

As a longtime local judge, Rucker says he felt he had the standing to pull off a campaign. But many attorneys who want to challenge a sitting prosecutor anywhere in the state may be afraid of making a powerful enemy who can have enormous impact on their careers. “‘If I run and lose, how will this affect my financial bottom line, or even the outcomes of my cases?’” Rucker said.

These same dynamics exist throughout the nation, making it common in nearly every state for only a fraction of prosecutor elections to be contested. But the dearth of prosecutor candidates in Ohio this year still stands out even by national standards. In the 2023 cycle, for instance, roughly a third of elections in Mississippi and Pennsylvania drew multiple candidates; half did in New York. 

Numerous factors can contribute to this scarcity of prosecutor candidates. Besides the fear of retribution, some Ohioans who talked to Bolts for this article spoke of difficulties fundraising, and said a general political apathy has set in due to the lack of competition for control of the state government as a result of practices like gerrymandering. 

Rucker, who is Black, said racism in politics may also weigh on the minds of people of color who consider running. He pointed to attack ads his Republican opponent, incumbent Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters, unleashed in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign that tied Rucker to some activism born of the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.

“An angry Black man who was tied into rioting groups who were going to come to the city and beat and rape women, and start fires and riots—that was the messaging, and that was the imagery in their ads,” Rucker told Bolts. “It was intended to emotionally sway suburban white women, Democrats and Republicans.” 

Rucker, who denounced the ads as “race-baiting” at the time, lost to Deters by five percentage points, even as Democrats won nearly all other county-wide offices.

“I was gonna be successful if it hadn’t been for some racist crap, which also may deter some folks from getting into races, particularly minorities,” Rucker said.

Shortly after the election, Rucker received a letter from a Hamilton County voter explaining why she voted for every Democrat on the ticket but him. The letter, which Rucker says he keeps on display in his office, affirmed his suspicions of how racism contributed to his loss.

“Mr. Rucker, I would not vote for you because you scared me,” the voter wrote. “When I watched your ads, all I saw from your deameanor [sic] was an angry, militant, black man. All I could think was that you would promote those traits.”

Deters, Rucker’s 2020 opponent, resigned in early 2023 to become a justice on the Ohio supreme court. Powers, his replacement, has already warned of rampant crime if she were to lose. Her campaign website says of the prosecutor’s office, “It is simply too important to let it fall into the hands of soft-on-crime criminal advocates.” Powers is uncontested in the GOP primary; in November she will face Pillich, a white Democrat.

In April, Powers warned of more liberal candidates transforming Cincinnati into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” two cities known for having large Black populations. “That’s veiled, stereotypical race baiting and fear mongering,” Rucker said. 

Rucker says he stayed out of this year’s prosecutor race because he’s enjoying his new work in private practice. But he also said he did not want to revisit the sort of attacks he suffered four years ago. 

“It took everything in me to hold my peace during that time and not cuss everybody out, and the second time I would,” he told Bolts. “I have zero interest in being resubjected to the kind of racially hostile messaging that was so very clearly central in the outcome of that previous campaign. Not interested. I’m enjoying my life too much.”

This article has been updated with information on the one county that had not shared its candidate list nor replied to our request by our deadline. Its prosecutor race turned out to be uncontested as well.

The post In Ohio, Uncontested Elections Worsen a Breakdown in Accountability for Prosecutors appeared first on Bolts.

“It’s been clear for more than a decade that Ohioans have wanted to regulate cannabis for adults,” Fox, political director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, told Bolts. “This should be a wake-up call.”

Issue 2 is set to go into effect Dec. 7, with the first round of new business licenses to be announced by September. But the law comes with a crucial asterisk: it changes state statute, not the state constitution, so its approval at the ballot is essentially tantamount to Ohio voters passing a new piece of legislation just like Ohio lawmakers do. This means that those lawmakers can change the law back without voter consent. There is no limit on the extent to which the GOP-controlled state legislature can amend the 41-page initiative voters just supported; they could even outright repeal it. 

Governor Mike DeWine and his fellow Republicans who run the legislature have stopped short of calling for total repeal, but even before Election Day, they had signaled their intent to make the law more restrictive if it passed. Now that it has, they’ve indicated they could make some changes as soon as in the next few weeks, ahead of the Dec. 7 effective date, while others may be a bit longer in the offing. 

Fox is incredulous that these lawmakers would cross the electorate by messing much with a law 57 percent of voters just approved. “It would be political malpractice,” Fox said. “That being said, they don’t always do right by their constituents.”

Ohioans need look no further than another ballot measure that just passed—Issue 1, enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution—to see that their legislature is comfortable upending voter will: House Republicans on Friday issued a news release claiming that Issue 1 doesn’t actually affect the state’s existing abortion ban, and they vowed to continue enforcing abortion criminalization, in defiance of election results. These lawmakers even said that they would “consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary” over the amendment—an extraordinary prospect. “No amendment can overturn the God-given rights with which we were born,” Republican state Representative Beth Lear said in that release.

These rapid threats come after Ohio Republicans earlier this year tried to torpedo the abortion measure by rushing a separate ballot measure to raise the threshold for passage of constitutional amendments from 50 to 60 percent. Ohioans rejected the measure in August, and Bolts reported at the time that these events were part of a long series of maneuvers by the Ohio GOP to undermine direct democracy. 

Cat Packer, director of drug markets and legal regulation at the Drug Policy Alliance, now worries that cannabis regulation ushered in by Issue 2 could similarly be distorted by politicians. “I think there’s going to be this real disconnect with particularly GOP legislators wanting to overturn the will of the voters and make this, potentially, something that actually does the opposite of what the voters intended in trying to address some of the harms of the drug war, and may be used as a vehicle to double down on some of those harms,” she told Bolts.

GOP leaders of both Ohio legislative chambers have already confirmed they’ll consider reversing aspects of Issue 2 that sought to unwind drug-war policies, which have produced vastly disproportionate enforcement of marijuana laws against Black people in the state. 

Issue 2 contains no provisions to automatically expunge the records of Ohioans who already have criminal convictions over marijuana. Other states have passed such a reform after legalization, but for now Ohio lawmakers seem more likely to loosen the measure’s other equity provisions than to strengthen them.

Senate President Matt Huffman has said that he takes issue with the amount of tax revenue that will be dedicated to promoting cannabis business opportunities for those most personally affected by prohibition. 

As it stands, Issue 2 calls for a 10 percent tax on marijuana sales, with a plurality of the proceeds going toward a program meant to provide financial assistance and license application support to prospective cannabis business owners who demonstrate “both social and economic disadvantage” resulting from the historically racist and classist enforcement of marijuana laws. That includes people and family members of people who “have been arrested for, convicted of, or adjudicated delinquent for a marijuana-related offense,” the law states.

Instead, some Republican leaders have signaled they want the tax money to serve very different purposes. Speaker Jason Stephens told local media that the legislature should allocate tax revenue from cannabis sales to fund jail construction and law enforcement training.

His remarks have alarmed people who worked to pass Issue 2 in Ohio, who say that a main reason they sought the initiative was to reduce incarceration and criminalization stemming from drug charges. FBI data show Ohio has arrested at least 5,700 people in each of the past three years for selling or possessing marijuana, and Black Ohioans have long been targeted at much higher rates than their white peers, despite comparable rates of marijuana usage.

Fox saw this up close when he was arrested multiple times in Ohio for possession of marijuana. These charges, he said, hampered his ability to take out student loans and to find housing and employment. But Fox, who is white, said he got off relatively easy: “I would go to court and have the exact same charge and criminal history, and the same exact judge, on the exact same day, and I saw people who didn’t look like me get much worse sentences.”

Packer of Drug Policy Alliance, who led Los Angeles’s cannabis regulation department from 2017 to 2022, also worries broadly about whether the aspects of Issue 2 that seek to promote social equity will be preserved. As both medical and recreational marijuana become legalized across the country—40 states allow at least medical use— it’s become commonplace for states to undertake restorative efforts like this one, but that wasn’t always true. 

“There has been a seismic shift,” Brian Vicente, an attorney and national leader in marijuana policy, told Bolts. Vicente, who is from Ohio, co-authored the measure that legalized recreational marijuana in Colorado in 2012, kick-starting a national movement. He also advised this year on Issue 2 in Ohio.

“Every law we see now has an attempt to address social equity issues and to try to remedy some of the harms of cannabis prohibition,” he added. “We didn’t see that for years and, in Colorado, it polled horribly and so we kept it out of the conversation in 2012. We cared deeply about the issue, but Colorado voters didn’t care.”

Because Colorado did not address social equity on the front end of its legal marijuana program, it has had to play catch-up for many years and remains behind the curve, current and prospective business owners of color in that state have said consistently. The same pattern has held elsewhere: in its short history, the legal marijuana industry in this country has shown in various states that it would marginalize Black people and other communities of color absent intentional intervention by regulators, even though those communities suffered the brunt of enforcement before legalization. 

Ohio has itself already learned that lesson: Black entrepreneurs have complained for years of being left out of the state’s medical marijuana industry. (Medical marijuana was legalized in Ohio in 2016.) 

Some states have sought not just to mend past harms through equitable business licensing, but also to allow people to wipe clean their criminal records for certain marijuana-related offenses. Ohio earlier this year passed broad legislation to streamline expungement for misdemeanor crimes, including simple marijuana possession, but neither this law nor Issue 2 creates a pathway for automatic record expungement. Automation eliminates the difficult and costly process of petitioning for expungement, and helps the legislation more widely impact the populations it’s intended to reach. Minnesota’s 2022 marijuana legalization law, for example, included an automatic expungement provision that impacted an estimated 50,000 people. 

Tom Haren, spokesman for the campaign to pass the measure, told Bolts his side was bound by rules limiting state ballot measures to single issues, which meant that Issue 2 could not force changes to the law regarding both regulation and record expungement. 

But while Issue 2 doesn’t mandate anything related to criminal records, the law does spend paragraphs detailing the profundity of the harm inflicted by criminalization.

“Individuals who have been arrested or incarcerated due to drug laws suffer long-lasting negative consequences, including impacts to employment, business ownership, housing, health, and long-term financial well-being,” the law states. “Family members, especially children, and communities of those who have been arrested or incarcerated due to drug laws, suffer from emotional, psychological, and financial harms as a result of such arrests or incarcerations.”

This, the law continues, argues for “remedying the harms resulting from the disproportionate enforcement of marijuana-related laws.”

Advocates hold out hope that some future legislation can address these harms, but for now their biggest concern is that lawmakers keep intact as much of Issue 2’s language as possible.

Packer said that when she reviewed those sections of Issue 2, plus those meant to promote equity in licensure, she feared that lawmakers would not let them stand if the ballot measure passed. Now that it has, and now that leading Republicans have signaled they’ll revise the law, she added, “I imagine those may be some of the first provisions that are on the chopping block.”

Because Ohio is 24th among U.S. states to legalize marijuana, Packer added, it cannot plead ignorance as to what will happen should lawmakers scrap equity-minded provisions of Issue 2. “Ohio should know better and it is in a position to do better,” she said.

The post After Ohioans Legalize Weed, GOP Leaders Already Want to Roll Back Key Reforms appeared first on Bolts.

Beshear emerged victorious on Tuesday, securing a second term by defeating Attorney General Daniel Cameron by 5 percentage points as of publication, the same margin by which Kentuckians rejected an anti-abortion constitutional amendment last fall.

Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, made the inverse gamble this fall that he could convince Virginians to hand the keys to their state government to his party even if he told them that the GOP would introduce new restrictions on abortion in the commonwealth. He proposed a new ban after 15 weeks, similar to some congressional Republicans’ proposal. 

But Virginians on Tuesday rejected Youngkin’s offer and Democrats, who campaigned hard on promising to protect abortion rights, won both chambers of the legislature by defending their majority in the Senate and gaining control of the state House from Republicans.

With these results, Democrats held off major Republican efforts to take full control of the state governments of Kentucky and Virginia, a replay of the GOP’s disappointment in the fall of 2022 when it failed to capitalize on the traditional gains for an out-of-power party. 

Republicans’ setbacks last year were widely attributed to the unpopularity of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, and voters reaffirmed various times throughout 2023 that reproductive rights remain a motivating issue. 

Proponents of reproductive rights on Tuesday also secured a decisive win in Ohio, where voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to establish a right to abortion. And Democrats also prevailed in a critical state supreme court election in Pennsylvania after they assailed the Republican nominee for signaling support for restrictions. 

Beyond Kentucky and Virginia, two other states were electing their state governments on Tuesday, and both held to their usual partisan form. 

In New Jersey, Democrats easily defended their majorities in both legislative chambers, expanding their majorities despite GOP giddiness this fall, so they will retain full control of the state government for at least the next two years. 

Republicans got their best result of election night in Mississippi, where they will keep control of the state government thanks to Republican Governor Tate Reeves’ reelection victory. The GOP did score a decisive victory last month in Louisiana, which holds its state elections in October, as they flipped the governorship to win control of the state for the first time in 2015.

Republicans will exit the 2023 elections with trifectas in 23 states, and Democrats will enjoy trifectas in 17 states. Ten states will have split state governments. Most states will elect their lawmakers or governors next state, opening the door to further upheaval in the shadow of the presidential race.

Below is Bolts’ rundown of the results in each of the four states that selected their state governments on Tuesday. (Bolts covered the Louisiana elections last month, and will continue covering the results of Tuesday’s local elections throughout the week.)

Kentucky: Democrats keep a foothold in a ruby red state

Beshear squeaked into the governor’s mansion in 2019, ousting a Republican incumbent by less than one percentage point. But he won reelection on Tuesday by a more comfortable margin, 52.5 to 47.5 percent. 

He enjoyed wide popularity during his first term, and his win on Tuesday was powered by heavy support in the state’s urban cores, and slimmer losses than four years ago in rural Kentucky. 

Cameron did his best to tie the race to national politics, pointing to Trump’s endorsement. He also accused Democrats of not supporting law enforcement and vowed to champion stiffer criminal penalties, a familiar campaign strategy for his party. As attorney general, he was responsible for the decision to not file charges against the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor in Louisville. But Cameron ran far behind the GOP’s other statewide candidates, all of whom prevailed easily for races such as attorney general and secretary of state.

The legislature was not up for election on Tuesday, though, and the GOP will retain their large majorities in both chambers, with which they’ve routinely overturned Beshear’s vetoes during his first term, for instance ramming through a ban on gender-affirming care for minors and major abortion restrictions earlier this year. 

Beshear has tried to make up for his de facto inability to veto Republican bills by occasionally flexing his executive authority, drawing some lawsuits and retaliation from Republicans. Within days of coming into office in 2019, he issued an executive order restoring the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of residents with felony convictions who until then had lost their right to vote for life. His reelection virtually guarantees that this executive order will remain in place, and in fact is likely to grow calls from voting rights activists who are pushing him to go further, ending the practice of lifetime disenfranchisement altogether as in the case in most states.

Virginia: Democrats grab full control of the legislature

Youngkin wasn’t on the ballot this year, but he banked on a strong showing by Republicans in the legislative election to deliver him more power and to solidify his national reputation. He spent months recruiting candidates and enforcing strict campaign messaging to pick up the few seats in the state Senate that would deliver his party full control of the state government. He proposed restricting abortion to 15 weeks, calling this a “reasonable” compromise in the wake of the Dobbs decision, and assailed Democrats for supporting criminal justice reforms.

Instead, it’s Democrats who made major inroads on Tuesday. Not only did they defend their edge in the state Senate, but they also gained at least six seats in the state House, costing Youngkin some of his political allies and flipping the chamber.

Over the last two years, Republicans in the state House had teed up legislation that would shift the state to the right, including new limitations on local criminal justice reforms and new restrictions on ballot access, such as repealing same-day voter registration and getting rid of ballot drop boxes. Such proposals will remain dead on arrival, as does Youngkin’s project of introducing new abortion restrictions. 

Still, Youngkin, who cannot run for reelection in 2025, retains use of executive power; earlier this year, he used that authority to drastically curtail the voting rights of people with felony convictions.

Mississippi: Republicans hold off Democratic hopes for an upset

Mississippi is one of the nation’s poorest states, and it’s also one of only ten that has refused to expand Medicaid to cover more lower-income residents, as provided by the Affordable Care Act. Democrat Brandon Presley made Medicaid into a major campaign issue this fall as he took on the state’s Republican Governor Tate Reeves, a staunch opponent of expansion. Presley, a commissioner on Mississippi’s public utility commission and a cousin of Elvis Presley, also zeroed in on a scandal involving tens of millions of dollars of misspent welfare funds that has engulfed Reeves, making Democrats hope for their first gubernatorial win in decades.

But Mississippi’s Republican bent proved too large for Presley to overcome. Black Mississippians vote overwhelmingly Democratic, but white residents vote Republican by a consistently huge margin. Reeves secured a second term on Tuesday, leading by five percentage points as of publication. 

Republicans also easily kept their majorities in the state legislature. They were running unopposed in nearly the majority of districts to start with.

Tuesday’s contests were beset by issues at polling locations in Hinds County, home to Jackson, which is a majority-Black county and the state’s most populous. They were also held in the shadow of a short-lived decision by a federal court to strike down the state’s exceptionally harsh felony disenfranchisement rules, which disproportionately affects Black residents. The ruling in August offered a glimmer of hope to disenfranchised Mississippians but the Fifth Circuit of Appeals ended up vacating it, once again shutting off polling places to hundreds of thousands of Mississippians.

New Jersey: Democrats put 2021 behind them

Democrats barely held onto their trifecta in New Jersey in 2021, when a surprisingly-strong Republican Party gained seven legislative seats and came within close striking distance of the governorship. This year, with all legislative seats up for grabs, Republicans hoped to make further gains on Tuesday—perhaps even breaking up Democrats’ legislative majorities for the first time since 2001—by rallying voters under the battle cry of parental rights and taking issue with school policies that seek to shield transgender students. 

Instead, Democrats easily maintained control of both chambers. Far from losing seats, they made up ground they lost two years ago; they have flipped five Assembly seats as of publication. Democrats also ousted Republican Senator Edward Dunn, whose shock victory against the chamber’s Democratic president in 2021 came to encapsulate their party’s poor results that year.

Continued Democratic control over New Jersey will test the at times frosty relationship between legislative leaders and Governor Phil Murphy, who was not on the ballot on Tuesday. Progressive priorities like same-day voter registration have stalled in the legislature.

And don’t forget about New Hampshire

By winning New Hampshire’s sole legislative race in a special election on Tuesday, Democrat Paige Beauchemin pulled her party within just one seat of erasing the GOP’s majority in the state House. Democrats now have 197 seats to the GOP’s 198.

In the never-ending election cycle, watch out for more special elections in coming months—two seats are already vacant—that will test whether the GOP retains a trifecta in this state.

The post Abortion Rights Power Democratic Wins in Kentucky and Virginia appeared first on Bolts.

After the Supreme Court removed federal protections for abortion in its Dobbs decision last June, the state’s attorney general immediately petitioned a federal judge to enforce a 2019 law that banned abortion after six weeks. It included an exception for when the mother’s life is at stake but not for instances of rape or incest. The six-week ban remained in effect for nearly three months, until a lawsuit brought by abortion providers led to an indefinite stay of the law. During that 82-day window, the costs associated with abortion care skyrocketed, and people were forced to cross state lines to seek the procedure—including, notoriously, a ten-year-old whose heartbreaking story became embroiled in a national controversy. 

The Abortion Fund of Ohio jumped into action, helping hundreds of Ohioans seek care elsewhere, in states where they could access abortion. The fund helped reroute them “out of state to be able to get the care that they were entitled to,” recalls Maggie Scotece, a doula and attorney who is currently serving as the organization’s interim executive director. (The organization is part of the coalition supporting Issue 1.)

But the organization, which helps people fund and access abortions, also received confused calls from, or on behalf of, people who could not travel: minors in group homes or juvenile justice centers, and people on probation and parole. 

Hundreds of thousands of Ohioans have their freedom of movement greatly restricted because they’re under some form of state supervision, and the stakes of Issue 1 may be highest for them. 

 According to data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative, Ohio ranks fourth nationally in the share of its population under any form of carceral control (this includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole), behind Idaho, Arkansas, and Georgia—“and that’s largely due to the massive number of people who are on probation,” said Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at PPI.

A 2023 PPI report found that, at any time, some 191,000 state residents are on probation, which is an alternative to incarceration that comes with heavy restrictions and surveillance, while around 22,000 more are on parole, a form of post-release supervision that in Ohio is baked into prison sentences. “Probation is handed out like candy here in Hamilton County,” said Sean Vicente, a Hamilton County (Cincinnati) public defender. 

Abortion is currently legal up to 21 weeks and 6 days in Ohio because of the legal dispute over the 2019 law. Meanwhile the campaign to pass Issue 1 and permanently codify abortion rights has raised millions of dollars and gained traction; recent polls have found that between 52 percent and 58 percent of prospective voters supported the measure. 

But Issue 1 has also garnered many opponents, especially among the state’s Republican leadership. If it fails, Scotece predicted that the state supreme court, which has a GOP majority, will “almost certainly” reinstate the six-week ban. 

If that happens, people on probation or parole would face an impossible choice, Vicente said: “Do I travel out of state to take care of that health care issue and possibly get locked up? Or do I have an unplanned pregnancy? Do I have an ectopic pregnancy? Do I have a child via rape?” 

“It’s going to put poor people in a really tough spot where they have to truly decide between health care and liberty,” he told Bolts. 

Parole and probation are often conceived of as alternatives to incarceration that can keep more people in their communities. But both systems are so full of delays, requirements, and catch-22s that Vicente says he and his fellow public defenders often fear they are “setting up our clients to fail.” 

“The restrictions that are placed on people—and the ban on traveling out of state, which is common, is one of these—are often so onerous that people say that they would just rather be in prison,” Bertram said. 

At any given time, 39 percent of the people in Ohio’s jails are being detained because they violated the terms of their probation or parole, according to the PPI report. That’s double the national average of 20 percent. 

“I can understand it being that high, because anything can get you [violated],” said Malika Kidd, who helps women navigate reentry as the Program Director for the Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry in Akron and Cleveland. “You can be around another person that was in prison and you can get violated, just in the same area with them. Somebody in your family can have a gun with them and you’re around it, you could be violated. If you get a traffic ticket and don’t let them know, you can be violated.”

Though women are generally proportionally underrepresented within the criminal legal system, they are far more likely to be on probation than under other forms of correctional control, and both parole and probation compliance present special challenges for women. “Women are more likely to be the primary caregivers of children—all of the requirements that supervision imposes that get in the way of childcare are going to fall harder on women,” Bertram said. “That takes a huge amount of time out of your day.” There are fewer reentry programs serving women, who are more likely to be homeless upon their release—another factor that would make it difficult to comply with the often onerous requirements that accompany supervision. “It’s a combination of a lot of stuff that can overwhelm anybody,” said Kidd. 

Kidd is, in many ways, the face of women’s reentry in Ohio, but her experience with parole there illustrates how arbitrary and burdensome the system can be—and how it restricts people’s freedom of movement. In 2001, after police found cocaine in her car on a trip from Chicago to Cleveland, she was sent to prison for drug trafficking. Her son was just three years old; by the time she got out, he was 17. 

As part of her mandatory minimum sentence, Kidd was given a 5-year “post-control release” term. From the beginning, she says, her parole officer seemed biased against her and determined to make her life harder. The woman upped her risk level, calling her a flight risk because she is originally from Illinois, and forced her to wear an ankle bracelet, which tracked her movements and prohibited her from leaving Ohio. Some people on probation cannot even leave their county of residence without permission. 

Moreover, Kidd says her parole officer exacerbated the already toilsome process with delays in processing her requests for permission to travel outside the state. Ironically, some of Kidd’s requests were in order to speak at conferences about the myriad barriers associated with reentry. Her work was understanding about her spending hours at the parole office waiting for approval, she said, but “I’m sure there were plenty of other employers that weren’t as flexible as mine,” which could leave people to choose between potentially losing their job—a violation of parole conditions in itself—or giving up on the travel request. 

If abortion were once again banned in Ohio, people on parole or probation might be forced to choose between lying to the officer or judge assigned to their case about their reasons for travel, going out of state without permission, or being honest. The former two options both carry the risk of violating your supervision terms and being reincarcerated. 

Vicente said he couldn’t fathom any judges signing off on a travel request that involved going out of state to do something that would violate the law if done within state borders. 

He said, “You’re petitioning the court to say, ‘Hey, I know this is against the law here in Ohio, but I need my client to travel up to Michigan to get the care she needs. Judge, are you willing to allow her to travel out of state to break the law that’s currently in effect in Ohio?’ That I doubt any judges would sign off on.” 

“I think there’s gonna be a lot of frenzied and panicked calls, and it’s gonna put us in a tight spot as well,” Vicente added, wondering how his fellow public defenders would begin to advise their clients under such circumstances. 

An unexpected and unwanted pregnancy—and the stress, exhaustion, physical and hormonal changes, and increased number of health check-ups that tend to follow in its wake—could also make it harder to comply with the terms of supervision. “The medical needs are going to take priority over visiting the probation officer, which puts you in further jeopardy,” Vicente said. More people being forced to carry to term a pregnancy that they don’t want and can’t handle could ultimately contribute to the already high percentage of Ohioans jailed for violating the terms of their supervision.

With polling showing public support for abortion and other reproductive health rights, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine recently proposed to soften Ohio’s six-week ban if it were to come back into effect and to allow some exceptions, for example in the case of rape. But other Republican lawmakers have already resisted such changes. 

Republicans also tried to change the rules of the initiative process in Ohio to undermine this abortion rights measure, which was petitioned onto the ballot by organizers who collected hundreds of thousands of signatures. GOP lawmakers called a special election in August asking voters to raise the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60 percent. That proposal failed by a wide margin in August.

The GOP’s proposal to change the rules in August was also called Issue 1, which has led to concerns of voter confusion as abortion rights proponents who fought the summer’s Issue 1 are now campaigning for people to approve the new Issue 1. 

If Issue 1 fails, it would add to the existing barriers that preventOhioans from accessing reproductive care. 

Even though abortion is currently legal up to nearly 22 weeks on paper, access is extremely limited in practice, Scotece of the Abortion Fund of Ohio said. While Ohio had more than 40 clinics in the ‘90s, anti-abortion groups have been “incredibly successful” in seeking to close them down, she told Bolts. The state now has just nine clinics concentrated in Ohio’s big cities, only three of which perform abortions up until the legal limit. 

Meanwhile, Scotece stressed that Ohio is already one of the leading states for the criminalization of pregnancy, whether it be arrests and prosecutions for self-managed abortions or the use of narcotics while pregnant. A 2021 study done by researchers at the University of California San Francisco that surveyed people who searched for abortion care via Google showed that intensifying abortion restrictions in the U.S. have led to an increase in self-managed abortions, including by attempting to hurt oneself or ingest drugs and alcohol—which would likely further expose people to criminalization. 

“We already know that folks who are low income, folks that are already under state scrutiny, whether it’s for parole or the family policing system, are more likely to be criminalized for pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes regardless of whether or not that is related to abortion,” Scotece said. 

Codifying the right to abortion and other reproductive care, and creating legal protections for people and organizations that assist others in accessing abortions, won’t solve all of these problems, Scotece added. But it will create a new test that Ohio courts must use when considering the constitutionality of a law that restricts or criminalizes abortion in the state. 

Kidd is not actively campaigning for Issue 1, but told Bolts she supports it. “It’s a woman’s right and I think these good old boys should not decide what a woman should do with her body.”

Correction (Nov. 1): An earlier version of this article misstated a quote from the Abortion Fund of Ohio, and inaccurately stated the number of Ohioans who sought out-of-state care when the six-week ban was enacted.

The post If Abortion Measure Fails, Ohioans on Parole And Probation Could Face Graver Restrictions appeared first on Bolts.