What a cop out. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said he didn’t want to sign another voter suppression bill into law before he signed a sweeping anti-voting measure into law last Friday.
Spoken like a true invertebrate.
Despite an outpouring of opposition from voting rights advocates, DeWine codified Ohio Senate Bill 293, a measure rushed through the legislature with only one hearing in the Ohio House that will change nearly every aspect of voting by mail, voter registration, and provisional ballot processing.
Why? Coercion from Trump World and litigation threats from its personal law firm, aka the U.S. Justice Department, unless its voter restriction demands were met.
Never mind that states, not the president or his heavy-handed lobbyists, run elections in America. But the cowardly governor clutched his pearls and caved.
Then he came up with a pretext about a possible ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on mail ballot deadlines that could decide whether states can count postmarked absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day.
DeWine weighed the legally dubious arm-twisting of a historically corrupt regime and what-if judicial scenarios against the rights of tens of thousands of voters being disenfranchised to appease Donald Trump — and chose excuse over principle. Again.
Ohio Senate Bill 293 was fast-tracked (to dodge public scrutiny and input) from introduction to passage and the governor’s desk for one purpose: control.
It was designed and padded with last-minute provisions to confuse and curb voter turnout, especially among Democratic-leaning demographics, in time to affect the 2026 midterms.
The trumped-up voting barriers DeWine “reluctantly” imposed on statewide voters, unsupported by objective data from Ohio’s own “gold standard” election administration, are a significant step backward for that system and voter rights.
Yet, next year, thanks to Trump toadying opportunists in the Statehouse and an excuse-making governor, Ohio will needlessly take away the already whittled down four-day grace period it gave to voters whose absentee ballots were properly completed, postmarked on time, and mailed before the legal deadline.
That post-election window offered 803,253 Ohioans, who voted by mail in the 2024 election, trust that their ballots would be counted if they arrived in the post-election window allotted — as some 9,500 ballots did last year.
But next year, under Ohio Senate Bill 293, those same U.S. citizens who were eligible to vote in Ohio and did so before the last presidential election could have their otherwise valid ballots tossed if they arrive after Election Day.
The law DeWine enacted effectively penalizes voters for postal deliveries that fail to meet sensible expectations.
The flimsy rationale for eliminating what was once uncontroversial — extra time to accommodate absentee voters for mail delays beyond their control — was “Election Day is Election Day for a reason” and “Allowing ballots to be delivered days after the election does nothing but hurt the integrity and credibility of our elections.”
Such well-articulated profundities are standard fare from state Sen. Theresa Gavarone, the go-to fabulist committed to making voting as difficult as possible for Ohioans with baseless nonsense that defies logic and discards facts.
The Bowling Green Republican’s thin reasoning masks a sinister mission to diminish voter power and citizen challenges to non-responsive government.
During the deliberately short-circuited legislative process to hurry Ohio Senate Bill 293 through the Ohio House and enactment in 2025, Gavarone folded in core components of another anti-voter bill of hers that had not passed the Senate.
It was a devious back-door move to jam through key parts of S.B. 153 (Ohio’s copycat version of the federal SAVE Act stalled in Congress) that will make it harder for eligible Ohioans to vote, harder to collect petition signatures, and create huge bureaucratic and financial burdens on county boards of elections.
What sailed out of the legislature in the waning hours of the lame duck session is worse than you think.
The bill that is now law also requires “documentary proof of citizenship” to register to vote or update your voter registrations (with birth certificates or passports that millions of voters don’t have), shuts down online registration and voter registration drives, increases provisional voting exponentially, and creates potential invalidations for minor clerical errors (which risks large-scale disenfranchisement of voters), bans drop boxes, makes citizen initiatives much harder and more expensive to conduct (to undermine direct democracy rights in the state), and expands mass voter purges.
This is not about election security. This is about erecting obstacles to suppress participation. To disenfranchise countless eligible Ohio voters, particularly married women, young people, the poor, people of color, foreign-born Ohioans. Many in these groups already face disproportionate barriers to voting.
The additional roadblocks Gavarone copy-and-pasted into Ohio Senate Bill 293 could prevent some from exercising their fundamental right to cast a ballot entirely.
This is democracy under aggressive assault in the state.
Mike DeWine could have vetoed S.B. 293 but said he didn’t to avoid potential chaos in future elections that might happen with a possible Supreme Court ruling that could affect the state or not.
Instead of making it easier for eligible Ohio voters to freely and fairly participate in our democratic process with expanded access and accommodations, DeWine copped for excuses that allowed more hurdles to be erected for Ohioans who just want to cast a ballot, have it count and not lose their birthright to petition for government change under punitive rules drafted to derail grassroots campaigns.
More legacy rot for the go-along governor.
- Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.
