Revitalized Union Power Helped Crush Attempts to Rig the System in Ohio
It is said that history is written by the winners. But when it comes to big wins by organized labor, the corporate news media, itself fighting unionization at all costs, tends to ignore unions even when they are shaping history.
Missing from much of the coverage about Ohio voters’ rejection of the Republican legislature’s attempt to raise the threshold for voter approval needed to amend the state constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent — was the central role organized labor played in mobilizing and helping to defeat the scheme.
In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade, the Republican legislature pushed through some of the nation’s most draconian restrictions on abortion. In response, in hopes of replicating the electoral successes of pro-choice groups in several states like Kansas and Kentucky, Ohio pro-choice groups gathered over a half-million signatures to put a ballot question before voters this fall that would enshrine a right to an abortion in the state’s constitution.
The GOP countered by rushing to place before voters the referendum that was defeated on Tuesday by a 56.5 percent to 43.5 percent vote that would have raised the bar beyond the 50 percent plus one threshold where it had been for 111 years. Other GOP-engineered snares for ballot access that were defeated included a requirement that voters’ signatures for a qualifying ballot measure be sourced from all of Ohio’s 88 counties, as well as a prohibition on curing deficiencies on their petitions.
Missing from the New York Times narrative, was the central role of Ohio’s unions in the unprecedented August mass voter mobilization which is seen by some as a possible 2024 bellwether. The newspaper did go into great detail about the sources of millions of dollars spent by both sides on the highly unusual summertime electoral contest it described “as a test of efforts by Republicans nationwide to curb voters’ use of ballot initiatives.”
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