Ohio Senate passes bipartisan bill to block ranked choice voting at state, local level
The bill, Senate Bill 63, received broad bipartisan support with a five Democratic detractors, including area Sen. Willis Blackshear, Jr., D-Dayton. It now heads to the Ohio House for further consideration.
Ranked choice voting, as described by the Council of State Governments, is "any system for counting votes that gives voters the option to rank their choices in order of preference."
Broadly, the higher a voter ranks a candidate, the more points that candidate gets in the count. It takes multiple rounds, each time eliminating the last-placed candidate and redistributing their first-ranked votes to whomever the voter picked as their second choice candidate, and so on until a winner is decided.
Ranked choice systems are used at state levels in Alaska and Maine, the latter of which uses it in all state-level primaries and all general elections for federal office.
While there are no local governments that use ranked choice voting in Ohio, there's a smattering of local governments across the country that do use ranked choice systems.
"My opposition to S.B. 63 is based on the ability for the state to withhold local government funding for localities that implement ranked choice voting," Blackshear told this outlet after Wednesday's vote. "Municipalities shouldn't have to worry about losing funding for implementing something that people in their communities want."
The bill received support from Democratic leaders (Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, D-Lakewood, called ranked choice "confusing") in the Senate and every Republican.
"Frankly, everywhere it's been tried, it's led to an awful lot of confusion, so I think it's good that we acted on this," Senate President Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, told reporters Wednesday.
McColley said he's comfortable with the bill's provision that would punish local governments that choose to use ranked choice.
"It does not infringe on home rule with the provision that's in there talking about the withholding of local government funds," McColley said. "There's (Ohio) Supreme Court precedent out there that says that is our appropriation authority to do that."
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