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A candidate running for office in Nelsonville is challenging the City Council’s effort to remove her name from the ballot
By: David Forster
Posted on:
ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — A candidate for office in Nelsonville is attempting to challenge an effort by the city to have her name removed from the ballot.
The council did this after voting last week to repeal Issue 23, a citizen initiative approved by Nelsonville voters last November that calls for the city to change its form of government.
Andrea Nicole Thompson-Hashman, who is running for auditor under Issue 23, filed a motion with the Supreme Court on Monday asking the court to allow her to become part of the case and challenge the city’s request.
The city quickly filed a response saying it will not oppose Thompson-Hashman’s request to join the case. It’s still up to the court to decide.
Thompson-Hashman argues in her motion the City Council did not have the authority to repeal Issue 23, which would abolish Nelsonville’s charter government at the end of this year and return the city to the form of government it had before the charter was adopted 31 years ago. The city then was run by a council and an independent, elected mayor.
The City Council tried in May to eliminate Issue 23 by putting a proposed charter amendment on the ballot that included language to repeal the initiative. It did not pass. Since then, the city has been moving forward under Issue 23, planning for the transition to the new government that would take over on Jan. 1.
But at its meeting last week, the council abruptly changed course and voted to repeal the initiative, saying it had the power to do so under the charter.
Thompson-Hashman’s motion cites a similar case in Zanesville from the late 1970s in which voters approved a citizen initiative to abolish the city’s charter. Three months later, another group of citizens put an initiative on the ballot to repeal the first initiative. It also passed.
This ended up in court, with a decision by a state appeals court that the second initiative was unconstitutional.
The court said when the first initiative passed, the charter was, for legal purposes, abolished at that point. It didn’t matter that the charter would remain in effect until the end of the following year as the city transitioned to a new government.
So the charter could not simply be restored by repealing the initiative that repealed it, the court said. Instead, the only way to get a charter back was to go through the process spelled out in the state constitution for adopting a new charter.
“Here Nelsonville is attempting the same unconstitutional attempt to adopt a charter … by repealing Issue #23 and thus depriving Ms. Hashman of her protected interest in being a candidate for office,” according to Thompson-Hashman’s motion.
The decision in the Zanesville case was by the 5th District Court of Appeals. Nelsonville is in the 4th District, and so the 5th District’s decision is not binding on the city. If Thompson-Hashman’s motion is granted, it will be up to the Supreme Court to determine whether and how it wants to apply the Zanesville decision to Nelsonville.
Meanwhile, the attorney representing Thompson-Hashman is expected to file a lawsuit directly challenging the repeal of Issue 23. While the repeal is central to the case before the Supreme Court, the question before the court is whether to order candidates names removed from the November ballot.
Given that the election is less than 12 weeks away, the court is expected to move quickly in answering that question. It’s unclear what would happen if the Supreme Court ordered the names removed in this case, but in a separate lawsuit the repeal of Issue 23 was found to be invalid. Would the names be put back on the ballot?
The deadline has passed for new candidates to get their names on the ballot. At this point, people can only run as write-in candidates, and the deadline for submitting the paperwork to be a write-in candidate is next Monday. Any decision on a lawsuit challenging the repeal itself would likely not come until well after this deadline.