Ohio Residents for Responsible Development enters the third week of its constitutional signature drive needing, by the math, 4,600 valid signatures a day for ninety days. The initiative — a statewide ban on new large data centers — cleared the Attorney General and Ballot Board in early April and began collecting April 3. [1] The target is 413,487 valid signatures from at least 44 of 88 counties by July 1.

Last edition's count put the organizers' internal aim at 700,000 raw signatures — the cushion industry practitioners assume is needed to survive county-board invalidation. That math implies 7,800 signatures collected per day across 44 counties, or roughly 177 per county per day. [1] No public count of signatures filed has surfaced since certification; Ohio's secretary of state does not tally during collection, only after submission.

MSM has moved on. [1] Ohio Capital Journal covered the certification; no national outlet has returned. Energy and AI-policy accounts on X have not. Fifteen Ohio communities already sit under local moratoria, and the General Assembly's competing study-commission bill runs in parallel. [2] The divergence is the cascade the paper named April 18 — Maine's statute, Ohio's constitutional initiative, Virginia's local board revolts — accumulating speed while Washington watches AI infrastructure the way Washington watched broadband in 1998.

Monday is Day 18 of ninety. A 4,600-per-day pace is not the kind of number that breaks the news. It is the kind that, in the third week of July, will have.

-- DARA OSEI, London