Several rural southwest Ohio residents trying to get a proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot banning large-scale data centers have cleared a hurdle. They still have a ways to go.
At its Thursday morning meeting, the Ohio Ballot Board voted unanimously to leave the recently proposed “Prohibition of Construction of a Data Center” amendment intact. Dividing it into more measures would have required organizers to gather at least double the number of signatures to qualify.
Still, members of the 100% volunteer effort led by Brown and Adams County residents need to collect more than 413,000 valid signatures, from half of Ohio’s 88 counties, in a tiny window of time—about three months. July 1 is the cutoff to qualify for the November ballot.
“We’ve never done nothing like this before, so we’re going to give it everything we got,” Adams County resident and organizer Nikki Gerber told reporters Thursday. “It’s time to conserve Ohio, not let data centers take away all the natural resources.”
The amendment would ban data centers needing more than 25-megawatts of electric a month, according to language filed with Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.
The electric-intensive facilities have taken over swaths of farmland over the last decade. Organizers, like Emily Harper, said local projects have been “cloaked in secrecy,” which prompted their proposed amendment.
“We’ve been taken advantage of,” Harper told reporters.
If the amendment does get onto the ballot, it is likely to face a range of opponents, from business stakeholders to trade labor unions.
A study by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce Research Foundation concluded the industry contributed more than $1 billion in state and local tax revenue in 2024, though only $260 million of that was a direct contribution.
And during the 2026-2027 biennial budget, lawmakers tried ending the sales tax break on the materials to build data centers, but Gov. Mike DeWine overruled them.
