If Ohio’s the election ‘gold standard,’ why are lawmakers going for desperate, duplicative changes?

Since when did the Ohio General Assembly become an arm of the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign for governor? Just asking. After the obviously coordinated spectacle last week between the billionaire and Republican lawmakers on a newly drafted resolution, inquiring minds wonder whether banners of the Republican nominee for governor may soon drape the Ohio Statehouse. 

In a truly audacious (or desperate) publicity stunt, Candidate Ramaswamy called on the legislature to speed a proposed constitutional amendment (that duplicates the state’s voter ID law) onto the November ballot.

The next day, both the Ohio House and Ohio Senate introduced identical resolutions to do just that — and fast-tracked the measures for passage by mid-June.

Why the mad rush to amend the Ohio Constitution with a voter ID provision — only three years after the GOP-controlled legislature passed the nation’s strictest photo identification requirements at the polls?

Good question.

The Ramaswamy-Statehouse narrative for suddenly putting the same mandates in the state constitution via a slapped together legislative amendment boils down to partisan insurance. 

The toughest voter ID law in the country needs to be constitutionally protected from “the whims of state lawmakers, judges and the political winds that blow them in,” wrote Ramaswamy in a recent op/ed.

A mere statute in the Ohio Revised Code enacted by Republican supermajorities, signed by a Republican governor, and enforced by a Republican secretary of state is “fragile” said the former hedge fund/bio tech executive, so the voter ID statute must be enshrined in the state constitution for added protection.

If that’s not a convincing case to make for a ballot amendment to replicate established law — and it’s not even in the ballpark of persuasion — Ramaswamy recycled assertions that “public faith in elections is at an all-time low” and “restoring public trust in elections” is important, yada, yada, yada.

In a telling sign, the Republican running for governor suggested his voter ID amendment should be easy to achieve because polls show voter ID proposals are widely popular — which, ironically, is also how Ohio Republicans sold their extreme voter ID law in 2023.

In 2026, Ramaswamy — and obliging Republican lawmakers expediting makeshift legislation for their de facto leader — intend to exploit that voter ID popularity to goose turnout in a toss-up election.

How else to explain a major constitutional change that makes no sense?

Stumping for a superfluous constitutional version of established voter ID requirements in Ohio will require fancy footwork on the campaign trail to market redundancy as a necessary amendment, but Ramaswamy, who tap danced his way to a fortune as a shrewd marketer, will spin away. He is already acting as if he’s governor with a compliant legislature in tow.

Ramaswamy’s running mate, Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, kicked off the impromptu legislative mission to enshrine settled voter ID law into the state constitution “to secure the fundamental right of voting and maintain that confidence in our election system.”

Pay no attention to the glaring cognitive dissonance of Ohio Republicans who boast of the state’s secure, “gold standard” elections while manufacturing gratuitous restrictions to “safeguard” voting and restore confidence in a system they acknowledge is above reproach.

“Voter integrity” is the tired mantra they repeat every time they move to restrict voting access.

They never address the lie that fuels legislative remedies for non-existent problems or reverse deliberately seeded distrust. Donald Trump tried to overturn a free and fair election he lost with an aggressive propaganda campaign built on deceit about rampant voter fraud and rigged elections.

He and his lackeys cultivated baseless doubt about the 2020 election even after it had been reviewed, recounted, audited, adjudicated and verified ad nauseam.

Trump is still lying about the election his own cybersecurity chief called the most secure in U.S. history. Those lies undermine the legitimacy of elections at the core of our democracy. 

Republicans perpetuate those lies with ongoing legislation that reinforces the perception Trump cemented about fraudulent elections that are, in fact, run by the book.

Ramaswamy credited the twice-impeached felon who tried to seize unearned power for recognizing the problem of depleted trust in elections and the solutions to “strengthen faith” in voting.

Pretty rich considering it was Trump who conspired to trample that trust and weaken that faith.

But it is the legislative maneuver in the Ohio General Assembly, synced to Ramaswamy’s ambitions, that most deserves voters’ scorn and rejection if the dual resolutions to amend the constitution (on a campaign whim) make it to the ballot this fall.

We’ve seen this movie before. Republican lawmakers tried to affect the outcome of another election with a last-minute legislative amendment thrown on a special election ballot in August 2023. It attempted to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments in the state from a simple majority to 60%.

The same legislative leaders — who just proposed a legislative amendment on a whim — claimed the constitution was revised too frequently and should be harder to amend.

It was a ruse to defeat a citizens’ initiative on the ballot three months later to enshrine abortion rights in the constitution — which passed overwhelmingly.

But Ohio voters saw through the Republican scheme to cancel their century-old majority voting rights to keep a majority of Ohioans from weighing in on constitutionally protected reproductive freedom.

Even in a sleepy summertime election, furious voters showed up to overwhelmingly reject the underhandedness of GOP leadership in the state.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.