Ohio Residents for Responsible Development began collecting signatures on April 2, the day after the Ohio Ballot Board voted unanimously to certify the one-issue amendment "Prohibition of a Data Center." [1] To qualify for the November ballot, the group needs 413,487 valid signatures from voters in at least 44 of the state's 88 counties by July 1. [2] Organizers are targeting 700,000 to absorb an expected 10 to 20 percent invalidation rate. [1]

The paper's Saturday lead on Ohio's seventy-two-hour cascade after the Mills ruling called this the first operational test of whether a voter-led constitutional ban can outrun its procedural clock. State Senator Bill Demora, speaking to reporters on Thursday, put the size of the lift in party terms. Even the Ohio Democratic Party, he said, cannot reliably gather 422,000 signatures in 90 days. [1]

The amendment, filed with Attorney General Dave Yost, would prohibit construction of any new data center with peak load above 25 megawatts, a threshold that captures essentially every large modern facility. [2] Ohio already hosts about 200 data centers, the fifth-most of any state, most of them concentrated around Columbus. [2] Organizers are all volunteers. They have county leaders in 46 counties and plan to collect at festivals, park shelters and public tables. [3]

"We've never done nothing like this before, so we're going to give it everything we got," Adams County resident and organizer Nikki Gerber told reporters. [3] Adams and Brown counties, rural and southern, are the initiative's geographic base. The Ohio Chamber of Commerce Research Foundation calculates that data centers contributed more than $1 billion in state and local tax revenue in 2024. [3] That is the number the opposition will put against the signatures. The next data point is how many the drive has when May opens.

-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing