On June 3, U.S. District Court Judge Edmund A. Sargus denied relief to Ohio initiative proponents. Thompson v Governor of Ohio Michael DeWine, s.d., 2:20cv-2129. The case involved difficulty of completing initiative petitions (both statewide and local) during the health crisis. The judge said the case is not moot. He wrote, “The previous year illustrates the difficulty in predicting the high and low tides of a once-in-a-century pandemic. So long as a global pandemic is present, there is a ‘demonstrated possibility’ that Plaintiffs will be again subject to public health orders of the type they challenge in the Complaint.”
But, he said the Sixth Circuit has already ruled that the burden in 2020 for initiative proponents was only “intermediate” and that is not enough to declare the procedures, as applied in a pandemic, unconstitutional. Here is the opinion. Thanks to Mark Brown for the link.
ONE voter pet forms for all candidates/issues.
Terrible decision.
You want pets to vote? Sounds like a Democrat.
Will Demo Rep ever stop being a retard?
The garbage comments on June 5, 2021 at 2:22 pm and 3:04 pm come from Will Klatt.
It probably came from you, jackass. As for the decision I see nothing wrong with it. The so called health crisis was bogus, and plenty of petitions in all kinds of states were successfully completed.
The Ballot Access restrictions in the US are no less heinous than the killing of competition candidates in other countries in accomplishing the same ends.
Killing people seems worse to me.
“The previous year illustrates the difficulty in predicting the high and low tides of a once-in-a-century pandemic. So long as a global pandemic is present, there is a ‘demonstrated possibility’ that Plaintiffs will be again subject to public health orders of the type they challenge in the Complaint.”
What if climate change raises those tides even higher?
“As for the decision I see nothing wrong with it. The so called health crisis was bogus, and plenty of petitions in all kinds of states were successfully completed”
An many were not, or even mot undertaken. Even if the crisis was bogus, the restrictions were not.
Timing is a big issue. The ballot initiative petitions were circulating during the worst part of the lockdowns. I am of the opinion that COVID-19 is wildly exaggerated at best, if not a total hoax. Notice how flu and pneumonia cases dropped drastically during this period. It has been proven that COVID tests were producing lots of false positives, and it has also been proven that they were counting people with co-morbidities who actually died from another cause (heart attack, cancer, etc…) as being a COVID death if they found any trace of a Corona virus (which could have been a Common Cold) in their system, as COVID-19 deaths, and they also counted “suspected,” but NOT verified, COVID-19 deaths as if they knew for sure that the person actually died from COVID-19 when they did not, in order to pump up the numbers. Hospitals were incentivized to inflate their COVID-19 statistics because they received more government grant money for every case they reported. I personally went out and collected petition signatures during most of this so called “pandemic,” except during the very worst of the lockdowns, which was for a period of about 2-3 months or so, as did many others, and I NEVER got sick, and I do not know of one petition circulator who died, or even got sick, with COVID-19, and this includes petition circulators I know of in their 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, and even 70’s, and some with pre-existing health problems. Isn’t that odd how petition circulators come in contact with THOUSANDS of people, yet I was never able to find even one verified case of any petition circulator getting COVID-19?
Having said this, all of the hysteria and lockdowns did make petition signature gathering much harder, mostly due to lots of events being canceled, or venues having reduced hours and/or reduced foot traffic. Therefore, the courts should have granted some relief in Ohio.
I know in California, a ballot initiative petition having to do with plastics, and another one having to do with expanding the number of games allowed at American Indian casinos, were granted extensions on their deadlines, as was the Recall Governor Gavin Newsom petition. The courts should have done similar in Ohio.
Init pet process must TOTALLY be in const — same as for ballot access —
to NOT have/let gerrymander monsters rig/stop the process.