All Ohioans should be very concerned about our current flock of elected State officials.

First, it was Governor DeWine’s tyrannical actions during the Covid plandemic, and now average citizens have exposed the lack of concern a for citizen-initiated statute by Attorney General Dave Yost. This tells us all we need to know about our elected State officials.

We need to clean house!!! Remember all of this when you are voting in May and November, 2022. “Dump DeWine” and “Yost is Toast” should be our battle cry.

People will say, if we dump DeWine and Yost the Democrats will win. Quite frankly, will you really notice a difference? Both political parties are morally bankrupt, and do not care about the average citizen. It is so blatantly obvious to those that are not political party partisans.

Brian Massie, average citizen

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Ohio’s Attorney General Dave Yost

Attorney General Refusal of H.B. 248
Citizen Initiative Petition

3/15/2022

 In late October 2021, Diana Smith, a frustrated voter from an area north of Dayton, started the process of a citizen-initiated statute in an attempt to get the “Enact Vaccine Choice and Anti-Discrimination Act”, mirroring language of Ohio House Bill 248, on the statewide ballot, after legislative efforts had stalled in the Ohio General Assembly. 

Working on similar efforts, Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom (OAMF) connected with Diana and her team of volunteers and together, in collaboration with citizen groups across the state, they collected over eight thousand voter signatures, during four attempts, to get the required approval from Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, so that the next phase of signature gathering and ballot process could proceed.

Unfortunately, these citizen and grassroot group’s efforts have been blocked by AG Yost at every attempt. The most recent rejection stating the citizen-initiated statute summary was not “fair and truthful” is by far the most absurd, because the summary language used for the citizen-initiated statute was derived directly from the Ohio Legislative Service Commission’s (LSC) own H.B. 248 bill analysis – as provided to all members of the Ohio General Assembly.

Despite having consulted lawyers on two of the previous citizen-initiated statute that were later rejected by the Attorney General, OAMF reached out to a third attorney, Nick Owens, to consult on the fourth submission, to help draft the latest proposal in a more thorough and technical way. As a group, we decided the best strategy to accomplish this goal was to follow the H.B. 248 text and summary language as provided by the General Assembly and LSC.

If we submitted a summary identical to the one provided by LSC to the General Assembly to describe H.B. 248, certainly the initiated statute petition summary would be considered “fair and truthful”. It was shocking to find that AG Yost did not agree. 

Highlighting the absurdity of AG Yost’s latest rejection of the initiated statute petition, OAMF has published a comparison document of the current text of H.B. 248, as well as the LSC bill summary, as pending before the Ohio House Health Committee, and the submitted and rejected citizen-initiated statute petition with summary. This comparison is attached to this release. As you will see from this comparison, the two are the exact same.

“Either Attorney General Yost’s rejection of the initiated statute petition is due to an overt attempt to block Ohio citizens’ constitutional right to bypass an impotent legislative body that has continuously ignored Ohioans, or the Ohio Legislative Service Commission is not competent in analyzing and summarizing legislation that they are drafting for Members of the Ohio General Assembly,” stated Stephanie Stock, President of OAMF.

Stock continued, “Legislative members and the public largely rely upon bill analysis published by LSC when deciding to support or not support pending legislation.

The latest rejection of this citizen-initiated statute should cause all Ohioans, conservatives and liberals alike, to question whether Ohio has a functioning representative government at all.” 

The below information you may consider helpful:
Here is a link to the most current text of H.B. 248
Here is a link to the most current bill analysis from LSC
Here is a copy of the citizen-initiated statute as submitted to Yost on March 3, 2022
Here is Yost’s most recent rejection letter (the 4th time)
Here is a link to this Press Release and the aforementioned bill/summary and initiative/summary comparison 

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Help Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom… These efforts are not possible without the generous support of patriots like you, please consider donating: https://www.voteyesonhb248.com/ 

For more information about the Ballot Initiative, please visit: https://www.voteyesonhb248.com/ballot-initiative

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Categories: State of Ohio