Ohio Residents for Responsible Development enters its fourth week of signature collection Wednesday. The group needs 413,487 valid signatures from at least 44 of Ohio's 88 counties by July 1 to place the "Prohibition of Construction of a Data Center" amendment on the November ballot. [1] Organizer Andrew Gula has said the group is planning for 10 to 20 percent rejection rates, meaning a raw submission of 500,000 to 700,000 to clear the threshold. [2]

The paper's Tuesday Day-8-week-three note marked the same information vacuum entering the window. The week-two check had already registered it. Wednesday is the start of week four. No running count has been released publicly. The county-captain map — 46 of 88 counties as of April 6 — is the only leading indicator. [2][3]

The Post at Ohio University published Monday the coalition's own lineage: Brown County, Adams County, and Clermont County residents as the initiative's founders, joined now by statewide contacts. The amendment would ban any new data center drawing more than 25 megawatts per month, a threshold that would block nearly every facility built for AI training — and which Ohio legislators quoted by The Post said would land only narrowly inside a Senate policy debate around similar 20-megawatt metrics. [1] State Senator Bill Demora, who has publicly said he would "bet my mortgage" the group cannot clear 413,487 by July 1, has not updated the bet. [4]

Three weeks in — now four — the running count remains the one data point that would settle the question of whether the signature path holds. It has not been released. The amendment clock runs 75 days to July 1. The running-count clock has been running four weeks without a public tick.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York