The late, great Marian Spencer — Cincinnati’s first African American woman elected to City Council and tireless advocate for the city’s charter form of government — almost always had a smile on her face.
Almost always.
When self-serving politicians did something she believed was foolish or corrupt, her eyes narrowed and she would shoot them a look that could burn a hole in metal plating.
She would not be smiling this week. Marian Spencer would be furious.
On Wednesday, the Ohio Senate, in a 24-7 vote, gave final approval to Senate Bill 63 and sent it to the desk of Gov. Mike DeWine to be signed nto law.
Senate Bill 63 would punish any city, village or township in Ohio that even thinks about adopting a ranked-choice voting system.
Doing away with ranked choice voting has been a priority of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement since the 2024 campaign. And the very MAGA Republican majority in the Ohio General assembly — plus a handful of Democrats — is more than willing to oblige.
Fair Vote, a national advocacy group, has a simple definition for ranked choice voting: “RCV is straightforward: Voters have the option to rank candidates in order of preference: first, second, third and so forth. If your first choice doesn’t have a chance to win, your ballot counts for your next choice.”
Mrs. Spencer was, to her dying day, a tireless advocate of proportional representation (PR), the form of ranked choice voting Cincinnati used to elect City Council members from 1925 to 1957.
Nearly every conversation about politics with Mrs. Spencer came around to her insistence that Cincinnati should go back to PR, the sooner the better.
Is it more complicated than the current system for conducting municipal elections? Yes, it is.
But, as Mrs. Spencer used to say, “you don’t understand how your television set works. Yet, when you turn it on, it works.”
Officials in two Cuyahoga County communities — Lakewood and Cleveland Heights — have suggested putting ranked choice voting on the ballot.
Under Senate Bill 63, sponsored by Republican Theresa Gavarone of Wood County and Democrat Bill DeMora of Columbus, any community even proposing adopting the system would do so at the risk of having their share of Ohio’s Local Government Fund cut off. That would be a major blow for communities, particularly the smaller ones.
DeMora, in an interview this week, said ranked choice voting would be “enormously expensive and comes with no additional funding for boards of elections who would have to administer it.
“It’s the law in Ohio that even if ranked choice voting were in effect in one little community, every polling place in the county would have to have the same machines,” DeMora said. “I talk to my fellow Democrats all the time who believe this is some kind of panacea, and it’s not.”
“I don’t like to take away home rule from Ohio cities, but I make an exception in this case,” he said.
State Rep. Ashley Bryant Bailey, a Cincinnati Democrat, said the issue to her is not whether ranked choice voting is good for Ohio, but whether Republicans in the legislation should have the power to punish communities who might want that system.
“I think local communities should have the ability to choose for themselves,’’ Bailey said.
There is no community in Ohio with ranked choice voting today.
It has been nearly 70 years since Cincinnati voters did away with PR in Council elections and went to the current “9-X” system.
The reason Cincinnati abandoned PR in 1957 is not a pretty one. In fact, it is one of the most shameful episodes in Cincinnati political history.
Republicans and people in the business community knew that if PR continued, Ted Berry, an African American Council member and civil rights lawyer, would soon be the top vote-getter and take a turn as mayor.
There was a sub-rosa whisper campaign aimed at Berry urging white voters to get rid of PR before they woke up one morning with a Black mayor. The campaign worked.
Berry stayed on Council for a while and then left town to join President Lyndon Johnson’s administration. He came back to town, ran for Council and was chosen by a coalition of Charterites and Democrats to be the city’s first Black mayor in 1972. He served as mayor for three years.
And he became the political mentor to Mrs. Spencer, who was president of the Cincinnati NAACP when she was elected to City Council.
Mrs. Spencer’s dream was the same as Ted Berry’s: that Cincinnati would return to its roots and bring back proportional representation.
But, with Senate Bill 63 in place, their dream will remain just that — a dream that may never come true.
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