From today’s AP News:
Republican Attorney General Dave Yost told the Ohio Supreme Court on Monday that rushing a lawsuit filed against him by a coalition of civil rights organizations seeking to place a package of voter protections on the November ballot is unjustified.
In a court filing, Yost said the July 3 cutoff for the “Ohio Voters Bill of Rights” to make the fall ballot is a false deadline. Ballot campaigns are often mounted in presidential election years in order to take advantage of high turnouts or to motivate certain voter groups.
“Indeed, Relators’ petition is in its infancy and they offer no support for their blanket assertion that their petition will survive the constitutional hurdles in time for the 2024 general election,” he wrote, adding that the group can always try for some future election cycle.
The coalition, which includes the A. Philip Randolph Institute, NAACP and others, told the court that needing to sue the attorney general shouldn’t “unduly delay” access to the ballot for the voters on whose behalf they filed the lawsuit.
At issue in the coalition’s lawsuit is a Jan. 25 finding by Yost that the proposed constitutional amendment’s title was “highly misleading and misrepresentative” of its contents. He issued the decision even while acknowledging that his office had previously certified identical language, including a Nursing Facility Patients’ Bill of Rights in 2021 and another Ohio Voters Bill of Rights in 2014.
Read the complete story here.