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Winner-take-all politics wins again
Repository Editorial
Jun 30, 2011 

The issue: Showdown on Senate Bill 5 

Our view: Up-or-down vote on collective bargaining won’t reflect Ohioans’ views 

Thousands of opponents of Senate Bill 5 paraded through the streets of Columbus on Wednesday, accompanying a tractor-trailer rig that carried more than 1,500 boxes of petitions to the secretary of state’s office. 

You’d want to create a dramatic made-for-TV moment, too, if you had set a record for the number of signatures gathered (nearly 1.3 million) to get an issue on a statewide ballot in Ohio. 

But the celebratory atmosphere Wednesday on one side of this highly charged issue masks an unfortunate reality for Ohioans: If about 231,000 of the signatures are deemed valid, as is likely, the state’s new collective bargaining law will survive intact or die altogether 

Nov. 8 despite the fact that polls show Ohioans favor some parts of the bill and disapprove of others. 

An up-or-down vote on this complicated, far-reaching law will be just the latest symptom of a crippling disease called winner-take-all politics. 

This disease afflicts both major political parties. Whether devotees of winner-take-all politics espouse radical change or blind loyalty to the status quo, they make compromise impossible because they see it as unnecessary or undesirable. This is vastly different from good government, in which politicians strike a balance among competing interests to serve as many citizens as possible. 

Polls show that many Ohioans see gray areas when it comes to collective bargaining by public employees. Unfortunately, if this referendum goes to the ballot, Ohioans will be able to vote in November only for black or white. 

Read it at the Canton Repository