Cleveland.com framed the Ohio data-center fight Sunday as a question with three answers: build, regulate or ban. [1] Five weeks into the petition drive aimed at putting a ban on the November ballot, organizers have not published a statewide signature count.

The required threshold to qualify is more than 413,000 valid signatures by July 1. [2] [3] The paper's Saturday accounting noted 67 days remaining. Sunday subtracts another. The count itself, the only number that converts the campaign into a probability, has been absent since the drive began.

Local outlets have offered fragments — a county here, a township there. [3] What they have not produced is the statewide tally that organizers should be tracking internally and that opponents would prefer remain opaque. Industry's answer to the petition is the language of "paying our full cost of service"; the petition's answer is "keep the power here with the Ohio people." [1]

Either rhetorical line is irrelevant against an arithmetic deadline. A ballot petition is a counting exercise, not a discourse exercise. Week five ends without that count. Week six begins with the same gap. The only number that determines whether this becomes a November ballot question is the one no one is publishing.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York