Susan Tebben, Ohio Capital Journal

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced the suspension of his gubernatorial campaign in an email to supporters on Friday.

Yost said he has enjoyed traveling around the state engaging with Ohioans in his bid to succeed term-limited Governor Mike DeWine, but “it is also apparent that a steep climb to the nomination for governor has become a vertical cliff.”

“I do not wish to divide my political party or my state with a quixotic battle over the small differences between my vision and that of my opponent,” Yost wrote, seeming to refer to fellow candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

“I am simply not that important.” Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who was also the co-leader with Elon Musk of the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency, received the Ohio Republican Party’s gubernatorial endorsement on May 9.

Yost said the state “has challenges ahead” and Columbus “needs re-engineering, not demolition.” He warned of a “comeback attempt” by former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown that could “unwind all of the good that the last 15 years of Republican leadership has brought.”

“This is a time to protect Ohio, not a time for a family squabble,” Yost wrote.

Brown has not formally announced any bid for elected office, but former Ohio Department of Health director Amy Acton has already thrown her hat in the ring to vie for the governor’s seat as a Democrat.

Yost, whose term as state attorney general runs until Jan. 2027, plans to “continue to fight for Ohio and Ohioans” for the rest of his tenure, but “I suspect that this is not my final chapter,” he told supporters.

As the federal government looks at ways to cut costs and fund Trump-administration measures, a congressional committee is considering a cut that could take billions from school breakfast and lunch programs.

That cut could impact more than 280,000 students in Ohio alone, and 728 schools in the state, according to data from the Food Research & Action Center.

FRAC identified this loss from a proposal being discussed by the Republican-led U.S. House Ways and Means Committee — membership of which includes Ohio Reps. Mike Carey and Max Miller — as part of upcoming budget reconciliation in the Capitol. The proposal would chop $3 billion from school breakfast and lunch programs.

“Taking away this important and effective way for local schools to offer breakfast and lunch at no charge to all their students would increase hunger in the classroom, reintroduce unnecessary paperwork for families and schools, increase school meal debt and bring stigma back into the cafeteria,” according to FRAC senior child nutrition policy analyst Erin Hysom and interim child nutrition programs and policy director Alexis Bylander.

The proposal would directly impact schools that don’t fall under the Community Eligibility Provision, a service based out of the federal National School Lunch Program, that serves districts in high poverty areas, allowing them to distribute meals at no cost to the students.

Schools are deemed eligible for CEP based on their participation with other programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).

According to a summary of the proposal among a list of possible budget reconciliation plans obtained by Politico, the CEP eligibility would be raised from the previous level of schools with 40% participation in the other federal programs to 60%.

Hysom and Bylander say the new proposal would reduce eligibility for CEP, making more than 24,000 schools nationwide and 12 million children no longer eligible, including the more than 280,000 Ohio children impacted.

The advocacy group Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio said the loss from this proposal would impact more Ohio children “than there are residents in the city of Toledo, Ohio’s fourth-largest city.”

“As I’ve said before, free meals can help our students thrive mentally, socially and physically, especially those whose parents are currently trying to do all they can to support their children while juggling their responsibilities at work and fighting inflationary costs at home,” Dr. John Stanford, state director of CDF-Ohio, told the Capital Journal.

Stanford also pointed to public opinion and a 2024 Republican research firm poll that showed a majority of Ohioans support universal free school breakfast and lunch programs for public schools.

“So why would our lawmakers on Capitol Hill look to pass federal legislation that goes against the wishes of all Ohioans and effectively reduces access to free meals for students by increasing bureaucratic paperwork for school administrators,” Stanford asked.

A 2023 report from the CDF-Ohio showed 1 in 6 children live in a household that experiences hunger and more than 1 in 3 children who live in households with food insecurity already don’t qualify for school meals.

Both Stanford and FRAC said the changes proposed by the Ways and Means Committee would create further opportunities for students to “fall through the cracks” by requiring proof of income to apply for free and reduced meals. The meal programs had already seen decreases in participation, due to the lapsing of COVID-19 pandemic waivers of school meals costs.

Ohio saw a 14% drop in average lunch participation due to the loss of the waivers.

“We need our lawmakers to be completely focused on helping children and not creating unnecessary bureaucratic red tape for an evidence-based, best practices program that’s working,” Stanford added. “This proposal would achieve the opposite.”

The state used its own budget in 2023 to make meals free for those who qualified for reduced-price meals, along with those who qualified for no-cost meals, but didn’t go the distance on universal school meals. The state is set to pass another operating budget this year that could include the discussion again, with a new House Speaker and Senate President at the helm.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has joined Ohio with three other states in a federal lawsuit seeking to keep certain immigrants from being counted in the U.S. Census including those in the country illegally and those with temporary visas.

The case was filed in U.S. District Court on Jan. 17 and also includes the attorneys general from Louisiana, West Virginia and Kansas.

Yost and the other state legal chiefs – filing the action against the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Census Bureau (an agency within the Commerce department) – say a residence rule that allows foreign nationals living in the U.S. to be counted in the decennial census resulted in 2020 Census figures that “included illegal aliens and aliens holding temporary visas” to determine apportionment for U.S. House districts and Electoral College representatives.

Since the first U.S. Census in 1790, counts that include both citizens and noncitizens have been used in the census and no count has left out residents due to immigration status. For decades, the hard-line Federation for American Immigration Reform has been fighting to stop that, and President Donald Trump attempted to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the census count during his first administration.

Reapportionment is the process of dividing up congressional seats among the states based on the census numbers, which then leads to the congressional redistricting that lays out the district lines for those representatives.

The rules on counting residents of a state say that citizens of other countries who are living in the U.S. are counted at the “U.S. residence where they live and sleep most of the time.”

“Due to this unlawful decision, Plaintiff State Ohio lost one congressional seat and one electoral vote in the reapportionment conducted pursuant to the 2020 Census,” the lawsuit states. “That congressional seat and electoral vote were reallocated to a state with a larger illegal alien and nonimmigrant alien population.”

The states in the lawsuit say in allowing the count as the “residence rule” does, the Census Bureau is in violation of the 14th Amendment, thus “robbing the people of the Plaintiff States of their rightful share of political representation, while systematically redistributing political power to states with high numbers of illegal aliens and nonimmigrant aliens.”

“Including illegal aliens in the apportionment base is inconsistent with the text of the Fourteenth Amendment because illegal aliens and nonimmigrant aliens are not inhabitants of the states,” the attorneys general stated.

Yost told the Capital Journal in a Wednesday statement that the situation at the U.S. border was also part of the problem that resulted in Ohio’s loss of representation.

“After failing to secure the border, the federal government reallocated Ohioan’s democratic representation to sanctuary states like California with a larger illegal alien and nonimmigrant alien population.” Yost said. “I am fighting for Ohioans’ voices and the rule of law.”

The Congressional redistricting process in Ohio following the 2020 Census was fraught.

The Ohio Redistricting Commission adopted two different congressional maps, both of which were found to be unconstitutionally partisan by the Ohio Supreme Court. The most recently adopted map stayed active, however, and was the map used for the last two election cycles.

The map will be up for redrawing this year because it was not adopted with bipartisan agreement. Ohio’s redistricting law states that a map passed without bipartisan agreement only lasts four years, whereas bipartisan agreement allows the map to last 10 years.

Legislators have until the end of September to agree on a redrawn map. If legislators as a whole can’t agree and pass a map, it’s again up to the Ohio Redistricting Commission to adopt a map, since an effort to eliminate the commission and introduce a citizen-led process failed in the November general election.

West Virginia also lost a congressional seat and vote on the Electoral College, according to new lawsuit, and if residents living in the state illegally or through temporary means continue to be allowed “each of the other Plaintiff States is likely to lose a congressional seat and an electoral vote in the 2030 reapportionment.”

California, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York were listed as other states who lost a U.S. House seat and an Electoral College vote, though they are not parties in the lawsuit. Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Montana and Oregon were mentioned as states who gained a House seat, along with Texas who gained two seats.

The states in the lawsuit also argue they are being deprived of federal funding that could be provided to them based on their population, if the census data was changed. The suit cites Pew Research Center data from 2021, which found that Ohio’s illegal immigrant population makes up 1% of the total population.

The attorneys general harken back to the country’s founding and the Reconstruction Era for their interpretation of the constitutional obligation to count the number of people in each state.

The lawsuit argues the Founding Fathers and those around in the years following the Civil War understood the phrase “persons in each State” to be “restricted to United States citizens and permanent resident aliens who had been lawfully admitted to the body politic constituted by the Constitution.”

“Representatives and electors represent only the self-governing people of the United States, their descendants, and aliens whom the people of the United States have chosen to admit to the political community created by the Constitution through lawful immigration by granting them lawful permanent resident status,” the attorneys stated.

Ohio, Louisiana, West Virginia and Kansas asked the court to vacate the residence rule as it pertains to counting illegal immigrants or temporary visa holders in the decennial census, and to order the Census Bureau and the Department of Commerce to include questions about citizenship in the 2030 census.

An Ohio woman who was criminally charged after having a miscarriage in her home has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Warren, city police officers, a local hospital and its owners.

Brittany Watts filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio Eastern Division claiming violations of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment, along with the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), a law that establishes the right for anyone to be admitted to a hospital in an emergency situation regardless of their ability to pay or insurance status, and for them to receive “necessary stabilizing treatment,” according to Watts’ attorneys from the firm Loevy & Loevy.

Watts also accused law enforcement of malicious prosecution and false arrest, and health care professionals with medical negligence, unauthorized disclosure of confidential medical information, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, according to the lawsuit filed Jan. 10.

Watts was charged with abuse of a corpse in September 2023 after suffering a miscarriage at her home in Warren, a case that received national and international attention. A grand jury would later decline to return an indictment, meaning her criminal charges went away.

“While Ms. Watts was relieved that the truth had prevailed, the closing of the criminal case did not erase the harm defendants’ misconduct caused,” attorneys wrote in the lawsuit.

Before the miscarriage occurred, Watts had gone to St. Joseph Warren Hospital in Youngstown, where she was diagnosed with “placental abruption,” a condition that “endangered her pregnancy,” according to attorneys writing on Watts behalf to the federal court.

Placental abruption occurs when the placental “partly or completely separates from the inner wall of the uterus before delivery,” which can reduce or eliminate the oxygen and nutrient supply to the fetus, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Watts waited for eight hours with “no meaningful treatment or guidance,” and came back the next day to find out her water had prematurely broken, her cervix was dilated, and she had an infection.

“Her pregnancy was doomed, her doctor told her; and until the fetus was removed, Ms. Watts was at risk of hemorrhaging, sepsis and death,” the lawsuit stated. “Time was of the essence.”

She sat “effectively untreated” for another 10 hours, attorneys told the court, eventually leaving for home again.

Early the next day, the miscarriage occurred in her bathroom, covering her toilet and bathroom in “tissue, blood and blood clots.” The fetus, which attorneys say was less than one pound, was never seen amidst the “bloody mess.”

“Nothing suggested she had delivered a living fetus, and indeed she had not,” the suit stated.

The woman cleaned up as best she could, and went back to St. Joseph Warren. Hospital staff then called police and “falsely” reported Watts had committed a crime, leading to police officers coming to the hospital to “interrogate” Watts and going to Watts home while she was in the hospital.

“She faced a year in prison for simply having a miscarriage at home,” attorneys wrote.

Included with the lawsuit was an affidavit from Dr. Joy Cooper, an OB/GYN who reviewed the medical records available for Watts. In reviewing the medical records, Cooper alleged that Dr. Parisa Khavari, one of the named parties in the case, “breached the standard of care when treating Ms. Watts by failing to provide proper medical treatment to Ms. Watts.”

The lawsuit states that a police detective and hospital staff questioned Watts for “nearly an hour” as she was in the hospital, with “false promises of leniency,” and even suggesting to Watts that she “had birthed a live baby and hidden it ‘in a cabinet.'”

An autopsy showed the fetus had died in utero, according to court documents, but Watts’ attorneys claim the investigating officer, Detective Nicholas Carney, “set out to present a version of events in which Ms. Watts had given birth to a baby she thought may be alive and had then abused it.”

Despite the fact that the criminal case is behind her, the lawsuit states that Watts “has not recovered.”

“As a proximate result of defendants’ actions, Ms. Watts suffered deprivation of liberty, reputational harm, public humiliation, distress, pain and suffering, for which she is entitled to compensatory damages, including damages for mental and emotional distress,” attorneys wrote.

The defendants in the lawsuit have not yet filed their responses.

Hundreds of thousands of Ohio children are enrolled in public health insurance such as Medicaid, which could be in for major changes and cuts as the new presidential administration takes hold with authors and proponents of Project 2025 nominated for key roles.

Meanwhile, the state of Ohio faces a new two-year budget cycle in 2025, where lawmakers and the governor will, among many other things, deal with Medicaid, any potential federal-level cuts, and financing for new child well-being laws passed just before the new year.

The federal Medicaid program includes the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and nationally covers 79.4 million Americans, targeting largely those in low income brackets or with disabilities. Data from the Health Policy Institute of Ohio showed more than 700,000 Ohio children between ages 6 and 18 had Medicaid as of the 2022-2023 school year.

More than a decade ago, the federal government allowed flexibility for school-based health services for those students who were covered by Medicaid, something the HPIO recommended for expansion in the state to help student health outcomes and well-being.

“Children from families with low incomes, and therefore eligible for Medicaid often experience more barriers to accessing health care due to factors such as lack of transportation or parent challenges taking time off work,” according to an HPIO report on school-based health care and Medicaid released in December.

The state’s Medicaid School Program also utilizes Medicaid reimbursement to allow schools to provide “school-based therapy services” to students on Medicaid as part of the students’ individualized education plan (IEP).

Source: Health Policy Institute of Ohio

The county with the highest student enrollment rate in Ohio was Hocking County with 53.7%. It was one of 22 counties with child enrollment rates between 42.6% and 53.7%, the highest range in the state. Another 22 counties have enrollment between 34.8% and 42.1%, and 22 have rates between 27.9% and 34.6%, according to the HPIO. Delaware County had the lowest rate of enrollment in the state at 9.9%.

But a new Republican majority in the U.S. House and changing of hands at the presidential level could mean less funding for the Medicaid program, and impact programs at the state level.

The rumblings of changes to health care in American started with the Project 2025 document from the conservative Heritage Foundation, authors and proponents of which have been nominated for roles within the Trump administration. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the Project 2025 plans, along with a Republican study committee and U.S. House Budget Committee plans could lead to a rise in uninsured Americans and health care costs in general.

Plans have been publicly revealed that would cut funding and change regulations for Medicaid, including rolling back an Affordable Care Act expansion, as well as a shift to block grants and another attempt at adding work requirements to adult Medicaid eligibility, something Ohioans have seen pop up in state-level discussions of the program as recently as Dec. 17.

With Ohio’s biennial state operating budget up for approval this year, it’s as yet unclear how these developments might impact the funding requests in Gov. Mike DeWine’s executive budget proposal when it comes to child wellbeing, or how the state will brace for impacts should the Medicaid funding cuts come down from the federal level.

One law in particular that is hoping to receive funding in the next state budget could be impacted by Medicaid decisions. House Bill 7 was passed at the end of the year, though it was passed without the funding originally written into the bill.

The new law targets various programs and aspects of state oversight when it comes to child development, parenting, and infant and maternal mortality.

Despite no new funding coming with the law as of yet, H.B. 7 was passed with provisions directing the Ohio Department of Medicaid to conduct a study on the reimbursement of “evidence-based peer-to-peer programming that supports infant vitality,” among other aims of the law.

When the law was still in the Ohio Senate Finance Committee, the Ohio Psychological Association praised the bipartisan bill sponsors for including a provision that would require the Ohio Department of Medicaid to look at reimbursement “pathways” for youth mental health.

The law would also require the director of the ODM to develop “policy and billing guidance” for providers on Medicaid coverage. It also requires the director to submit a report to the governor and the General Assembly laying out stakeholder engagement regarding ODM procedures on early childhood mental health services coverage and accounting for the number of families and children served, along with the services and outcomes from the programs, according to the Legislative Service Commission analysis of the bill.

Ohio women 50 and older are headed to the polls having lived through the days before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, during the time when abortion was legal, and now, after the decision was overturned in 2022 and power given to each state to decide.

That has played a factor in many women’s decisions at the ballot box, though it’s only one factor of many, voters told the Capital Journal in interviews last week.

“I am not a single issue voter, by any means,” said Mansfield resident and registered Republican Linda Smith.

But abortion rights has come to the forefront, and in fact has galvanized older women voters in the weeks leading up to the November general election.

U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno made comments about abortion rights and the interests of suburban women, which have since been used in campaign ads against him.

Those comments have also renewed conversations about the topic with women who may not be experiencing pregnancy or the need for an abortion, but who remember times when reproductive health care was more risky, and are looking to the future for their daughters and granddaughters.

“Women don’t make their health care choices and decisions lightly and they’re often complicated decisions.” Smith said. “They’re life-altering.”

Moreno’s comments were made at a town hall in Warren County and first made public by WCMH via a viewer-submitted video.

“You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters,” Moreno said. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ OK. It’s a little crazy by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”

After a pause, he added, “Oh, thank God my wife didn’t hear that part.”

Moreno’s campaign did not respond to a request by the OCJ for comment, but in a previous statement to The Statehouse News Bureau, spokesperson Reagan McCarthy said Moreno was “clearly making a tongue-in-cheek joke about how Sherrod Brown and members of the leftwing media like to pretend that the only issue that matters to women voters is abortion.”

After Moreno’s comments, an open letter was released by Republican, independent and Democratic-voting women, saying Moreno “mocked many of us who are over the age of fifty” and criticizing him for trying to “play your comments off as a joke” after the fact.

“As Ohio women across the political spectrum, we don’t agree on everything,” the letter stated. “But there are some things bigger than party politics. What unites us is the firm belief that Ohio women should have the ability to make their own health care choices, free from the involvement of people like you.”

Smith was one of the Republican voters to sign on to the letter.

“It’s distressing to me to see that this (issue) has become a political pawn,” Smith told the Capital Journal.

The issue is coming up among other priorities for older Ohioans, such as inflation, the economy and Social Security.

An August survey commissioned by the AARP showed 16% of Ohio’s 50+ voters polled placed it as their first or second choice among important issues driving their votes in the general election. Nine percent of 50+ survey takers put it as their most important issue in the election, putting it above other single issues like Social Security, taxes, gun control, crime, general health care, foreign policy, Medicare and climate change.

The AARP poll also found that 94% of 50+ Ohio voters plan to vote in the upcoming election.

Overall, incumbent Ohio Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown held a narrow lead over Moreno, 46%-42%, but among 50+ voters specifically, the race was reportedly much closer, with Moreno holding a five-point edge in the August AARP numbers.

Seville resident Mosie Welch is a registered Democrat in her 60s, and she readily admits reproductive rights tops the list of issues she is using to decide her votes. She connects reproductive health care to family issues, along with the economic health of the state and the concept of individual rights.

“Yes, this is one of the big issues driving my vote, especially at the national level, because I fear what will happen if women no longer have the right to make decisions about their own bodies as they don’t in some states today,” Welch said.

As a mother and grandmother, she wants to see future women have the “full range of health care necessary to ensure that they can live their life as fully as possible.”

“I’m not expecting to personally need this health care, but I would imagine there’s many families worried about this issue,” Welch said.

She also fears for the rights of physicians, who expressed concern about litigation and the potential loss of medical licenses, along with patient care delays, as the debate over abortion rights went on after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade.

“When that happens and a woman dies, or a woman loses their fertility, or is racking up huge medical bills, that doesn’t just affect one individual,” Welch said. “It affects everybody, it affects the community.”

Combining her decades of life experience and the rhetoric of the 2024 election has only served to motivate Welch and her fellow voters, like Susan Polakoff Shaw.

“I know a lot of women who are rage-filled, and it’s women around my age who know what it’s like, who have heard what it was like pre-Roe,” said Shaw, who did work for Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights during the 2023 election. “It’s about being able to control your life and have a say in your future and your destiny, and your health and your family.”

More than just reproductive rights as an issue for older women, Smith said her decisions in the upcoming election are informed by elected officials who “frequently disregard the will of the people,” including legislative attempts and comments that seek to undermine the reproductive rights amendment passed by a majority of state voters last year.

“You can disagree, but when 57% of the electorate votes for that, you need to respect that,” Smith said.

But Smith said she is optimistic for the future of Ohio and even the Republican Party, partly because of the discussion brought on by Moreno’s comments.

“People who rise above their differences to fight for common causes – like you are seeing now for women’s reproductive freedoms,” Smith said, “it’s that collective voice and vote that will make a difference.”

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and X.

Ohio is one of seven states that elects state supreme court justices based on partisan elections — which can impact voters and campaign finance dollars. This is a new change, with Ohio Republican lawmakers adding party labels to the races starting in 2022.

However, partisan elections are “a difficult fit for judges,” said Michael Milov-Cordoba, counsel for The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law.

“Legislators are changing the types of elections … to obtain a political advantage one way or another,” he said. “State courts are all deciding more significant national issues than they were in the past.”

Nonpartisan elections are used in 14 states for state supreme court races and another 14 use what’s called “merit selection,” a sort of job application process where candidates apply for a vacancy in the judicial system in a state, a nominating commission reviews the applications and makes a recommendation to the governor or other appointing entity, according to The Brennan Center.

The rest of the states use either gubernatorial or legislative appointment, or a hybrid selection process. Ohio switched from nonpartisan to partisan supreme court elections in 2021.

Something else that has changed along with the new partisanship in the race is the money involved.

“What we’re seeing in the past few cycles is an unprecedented amount of outside spending in judicial candidate races,” Milov-Cordoba said.

About 9% of donations to the six Ohio Supreme Court candidates totaling more than $365,000 have come from outside of Ohio as of Sept. 19, according to 2023 and 2024 campaign donations posted on the Ohio Secretary of State’s website.

Incumbent Democratic Justice Michael P. Donnelly is being challenged by Republican Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas Judge Megan Shanahan.

Incumbent Republican Justice Joseph Deters, who decided not to run for his current seat, is opting instead to go up against incumbent Democratic Justice Melody Stewart.

Democratic candidate Lisa Forbes, of the Eighth District Court of Appeals, and Republican candidate Dan Hawkins, of the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, are battling for Deters’ open seat.

The Ohio Supreme Court currently has a 4-3 Republican majority. This election could either flip the court Democratic or Republicans will add to their numbers.

The Democratic candidates have received nearly $272,000 in contributions from outside of Ohio and the Republican candidates have gotten more than $93,000 in out-of-state contributions, as of Sept. 19.

Deters has received the most campaign contributions with more than $909,000 and Stewart has received the least amount of contributions with more than $480,000, as of Sept. 19. About 4% of Deters campaign donations have been from out-of-state, with nearly half of those coming from Florida.

Hawkins has received about $27,400 from out-of-state donations and Shanahan has received about $21,200 in contributions from outside of Ohio, as of Sept. 19. Both of them received the most out-of-state money from Washington, D.C.

Donnelly has received about $98,400 in donations from outside of Ohio, about 16% of his total donations, as of Sept. 19. 16% of Forbes’ campaign contributions has also come from out of Ohio, totaling about $97,300. About 15% of Stewart’s donations (about $76,100 came from outside of Ohio. All three democrats received the most out-of-state donations from New York.

The change in spending for judicial races has been significant over the past 15 to 20 years, said Phillip Marcin, professor of instruction at the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron.

“Outside groups weren’t spending a lot of money, to the point where they were just low-profile affairs,” Marcin said.

But now that there has been an “explosion of spending” and partisan labels added to the races, Marcin said judicial races are starting to resemble more “political” races, like legislative or congressional races.

Campaigning rules for judicial candidates are different, for example, candidates are restricted from making knowingly false statements about fellow candidates in television ads, and typically ads paid for by judicial campaigns focus on their candidate’s qualities and qualifications.

But changing the elections to include partisan affiliations could have impacts on voters without any effort on the candidates’ part.

Marcin said the ongoing debate on whether or not political parties should be attached to judicial candidates has brought two arguments: supporters of the partisan elections (and increased spending on those races) say if voters turn out specifically to vote for other candidates on the ballot, they are more likely to also vote in judicial elections. This decreases the “roll-off” percentage, or the number of people who vote at the top of the ticket, but ignore down-ballot races and issues.

“(Supporters of partisan elections say) the more campaign spending that happens in judicial races, the more the roll-off decreases,” Marcin said.

During the 2020 election, more than a million Ohioans who voted didn’t vote for a state supreme court justice.

Opponents of partisan affiliations, which has included former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, say having to answer to a political party can alter judicial behavior.

“The traditional notion of a judge is that they should be neutral and impartial,” Marcin said.

But if pushed to run in partisan campaigns with donations coming their way, Marcin said research has shown judges can feel “expected to rule in line with the groups that you’ve received money from,” such as increasing sentences to appear “tougher on crime.”

“There’s evidence that judges alter their behavior in order to increase their chances of election,” Marcin said. “…That should be incredibly frightening to everyone.”

This could be a problem because of the impact judicial races have on the long term future of not just the state, but also the country as a whole.

“There used to be a lot of issues that were more federal in nature, but on some of these issues the United States Supreme Court has said we’re not really going to deal with these things anymore, we’re going to leave these to the state,” Marcin said.

Some of these issues include redistricting and abortion – which was sent back to the states in the Dobbs decision – both of which are hot issues in Ohio with 2023’s Issue 1 that enshrined reproductive rights in the Ohio Constitution, and this year’s Issue 1, which seeks to constitutionalize redistricting reform.

The Ohio Supreme Court has also already been asked to rule on various issues having to do with the reproductive rights amendment and state laws regulating abortion, along with redistricting maps by the Ohio Redistricting Commission, and summary language for the redistricting reform proposal.

“Now, the states are much more influential on these issues that are going to impact thousands, hundreds of thousands of people,” Marcin said.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and X.

Voting rights advocacy organizations are calling on the Ohio Secretary of State to create consistency within the county boards of elections when it comes to voter registration challenges.

The urgency comes in particular because of one group, the Ohio Election Integrity Network, which advocates say has been approaching multiple Ohio counties with lists of hundreds of voters they say are ineligible to vote in Ohio and should be removed from rolls. The way in which they are approaching county boards goes against the existing process of maintaining voting rolls, elections advocates say.

“Really all of it is centered around poking holes in the election systems and the processes we’ve been using,” said Kelly Dufour, voting and elections manager for Common Cause Ohio.

“Troubling challenges” are playing out in multiple counties because of the OEIN and similar groups, according to Common Cause Ohio, impacting the way in which board of elections are able to move forward with election processes, and spotlighting the varied resources and workloads each county has.

“We know election officials have a critical role to play, but they’re already playing it,” Dufour said in a press briefing on Wednesday. “They don’t need outside interference trying to lighten their load.”

She said she watched a voter challenge hearing in Hamilton County that lasted more than an hour. The subject of the hearing was a 34-year-old doctor who was matched by her medical school to work in Kentucky, but still shared a residence with her mother in Ohio.

“I watched her be cross-examined by an attorney as she defended her housing choices, her employment choices,” Dufour said, adding that she was asked what jobs she’d turned down as well.

Advocacy groups were also alerted to OEIN approaching the Licking County Board of Elections with “hundreds” of voter registration challenges through a news article by The Reporting Project.

At a public comment period during the Montgomery County Board of Elections’ July 9 meeting, Scott Taylor identified himself as a member of a “research team” in the county for the OEIN, and made a presentation about more than 50 voter registration challenges being made by the group in the county. He asked for a timeline on when the challenges would be dealt with.

Board director Jeff Rezabek was the first to speak after Taylor’s presentation, and started off by saying he found it “absolutely disingenuous of Scott to come before the board and throw these questions out there.”

“He knows these answers,” Rezabek said.

The director said they had spoken through phone calls and “several” emails, and he had explained that the voters would need to be notified of the challenge and allowed to provide proof of residency or allowed to confirm they were no longer Ohio residents.

He told the board that the data provided by the OEIN was only through the year 2022.

Rezabek said he was also waiting for the already in-process change of address verification to work its way through the system, to see if any of the names were removed automatically.

“Anybody that is not removed from the current purge process, we will be having a hearing for and I think that’s what required of the law under the spirit of the law,” Rezabek told the board.

Common Cause of Ohio, the ACLU of Ohio, and the All Voting is Local’s Ohio chapter — combining to call themselves the Ohio Voter Rights Coalition — came together in a letter to Secretary of State Frank LaRose asking him to guide the local boards in their interactions with these groups.

“It is our assertion that this process that Ohio EIN is implementing is actually circumventing the process of voter challenges,” Kayla Griffin, state director for All Voting is Local, said in the Wednesday press call.

The letter calls on LaRose to “issue a directive to summarily ignore voter flags from private groups” that do not follow provisions in Ohio law, including the cancellation procedure that voters can only be removed after a challenger has signed a form “under penalty of election falsification” and after notification of the actual voter.

Advocates at the press briefing and in the letter to LaRose criticized the departure of the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a system used by multiple states to share data from motor vehicle registration departments to verify voter addresses.

“In the absence of (ERIC), the Secretary of State’s Office has created a void in our system which has allowed an unauthorized private group to swoop in and conduct a function that belongs to the state,” the letter from voting rights groups stated.

According to their website, OEIN supports House Bill 472, a GOP-sponsored bill still sitting in the Ohio House Homeland Security Committee which would require that an elector have a state ID or driver’s license in order to vote and would also require election officials to compare an elector’s photo ID with “the elector’s appearance or with a photo on file, and if they do not match, to challenge the elector’s right to vote,” according to the bill.

Neither the Secretary of State’s Office nor the OEIN responded to requests for comment from the Capital Journal.

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