Posted on 07/17/2011 6:31:54 AM PDT by RC one
It's (not quite) official: Ohioans will have the chance to vote yes or no on the controversial public employee collective-bargaining bill known as Senate Bill 5.
Based on preliminary numbers provided to The Dispatch by county boards of elections, the petition to place the referendum on the Nov. 8 ballot has enough valid statewide signatures from just two counties, Cuyahoga and Franklin.
Collectively, these two counties have validated more than 235,000 signatures. Fewer than 232,000 signatures are needed to place the item on the ballot. Additionally, at least 44 of Ohio's 88 counties must have signatures from 3 percent of the number of votes cast in each county in the 2010 governor's election.
When several of Ohio's biggest counties are added together - Cuyahoga, Franklin, Hamilton, Lucas and Montgomery - the number of validated signatures stands at 365,400, according to the local boards of election. From these counties, 494,070 signatures have been checked.
The petition, circulated by the group We Are Ohio, had 1.3 million signatures when it was submitted to the secretary of state's office last month. The occasion was accompanied by a march and rally by several thousand people Downtown and a tractor-trailer truck pulling up to the secretary of state's building to unload the petition forms.
We Are Ohio says that Senate Bill 5 would kill jobs and that public employees are not overpaid to begin with. Building a Better Ohio, the group organized to lead the effort in support of the bill, says the law will protect the middle class and actually keep public employees like teachers and emergency service workers on the job.
We Are Ohio spokesperson Melissa Fazekas said in an email that the group is confident of qualifying for the ballot in November.
Building a Better Ohio doesn't disagree. Spokesperson Jason Mauk said he expected it to be on the ballot, and the group is working on the November campaign.
"Ohioans now have a choice to make about whether to keep these reasonable reforms or keep moving in the wrong direction," he said.
In recent weeks, two Republican presidential hopefuls have come out in support of Senate Bill 5. In June, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney posted on Facebook that he "(stands) with John R. Kasich and Ohio's leaders as they take on this important fight to get control of government spending."
Building a Better Ohio posted a YouTube video featuring former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.
"Building a better Ohio is a very important challenge," Gingrich said. "Under Governor John Kasich's leadership the state legislature passed collective-bargaining reforms that's going to allow local governments to do much more effective jobs."
Gingrich went on to compare the fight in Ohio to similar battles in Wisconsin and New Jersey.
In addition to Senate Bill 5, the county boards of elections are also working to check signatures for the Ohio Health Care Freedom Amendment, aiming to eliminate the federal health care mandate in Ohio. This amendment still has several weeks until the results must be turned in to the Secretary of State, and several counties have not even started validating these signatures.
Franklin County has validated about 32,000 signatures, Lucas County 16,301 and Montgomery County 7,809. At least 385,245 signatures must be validated for the amendment to make the ballot. More than 546,000 signatures were turned in. In Franklin County, the validation rate is currently about 75 percent, with similarly high numbers in other counties.
The tea party groups that drove the petition are still collecting signatures, which can be turned in up to 10 days after the initial total is announced by the secretary of state's office.
My guess is, the SB5 vote will pan out just like every general election does with rural voters being more inclined to support Kasich and SB5 and urban voters looking to repeal it. If rural Ohioans do not come out in force against this bill, it will be a sign that Ohio Republicans aren't fired up about the current Republican platform. Given Ohio's national bellwether nature, that might be worth noting if it does happen that way. The reverse situation would be equally worth noting of course. Bottom line, we want to watch this matter closely as it should provide us with an idea of how we should approach the 2012 races.
This is a very annoying article. While it quotes people who are for and against the proposal being put on the ballot, nowhere does it say what, exactly, the proposal is.
I can deduce that SB5 is probably a good thing (if I were an Ohio voter), since the unions are organizing the effort to overturn it—but I don’t really know, given the lack of explanation in the article.
If they get all the signatures they need by the deadline, Ohio voters will be able to veto SB5 (and Governor Kasich)in November, 2011. The results of this referendum will give us an idea of what we can expect in 2012. If Ohioans overwhelmingly reject SB5, we can expect Barack Obama to be very competitive in Ohio in 2012.
This article breaks the first rule of basic reporting (much less journalism): It never tells the reader WHAT is in SB 5!
I was able to infer it had something to do with limiting public employee collective bargaining, but I really don’t know what it is proposing.
I can and will go look it up, but it is an indictment on just how low news standards have fallen (not blaming the OP — just the author).
LOL!! GTMA (see my post 4).
It also jumps back and forth between groups and people and you have to backtrack to see who is supporting what.
Badly written to say the least.
We just have to watch how it is worded because I read somewhere that to vote against it will keep it law and it will be important that people for for it to keep it the law.Guess we will have to see how it is done to know how to vote to keep it law.
That’s why I’m posting the article. It’s important for all of us to know what SB5 is, why it’s an issue, and what its repeal will mean for the conservative cause. SB5 would reduce collective bargaining rights of all public workers in the state of Ohio. It is widely regarded as an attack against union labor in general in Ohio. The unions have managed to obtain enough signatures to get a referendum vote on the bill this November so Ohio voters will have the chance then to either codify the bill into law or repeal it. How they respond to this bill will give us an idea of how Ohioans are feeling, in general, about their recent shift to the right and; therefore, it will give us insight into how 2012 may pan out for us. It will be a portend IOW. The bill is highly controversial in Ohio but has avoided the kind of publicity that the Wisconsin legislature and governor have garnered. IMO, SB5 is more important to us, however, given Ohio’s battleground status and Wisconsin’s history of being solidly democratic.
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