The leader of the Ohio Democratic Party says petition signatures will be turned in later this week to put the recently passed election reform law up for a referendum next November. Chris Redfern says more than 238 thousand valid signatures are needed to put the issue on the ballot. He says the group has collected more than 300 thousand signatures and they have checked them out to make sure most of them are valid.
He says, "There's a process. You take the petitions back, you run them against the voter file, you make sure those names are in fact valid names because you don't want to waste anybody's time. And so we're quite confident that we're going to do it and I'm not doing it because it's me. I'm truly confident in this regard that we're going to have the signatures necessary to replace the repeal on the ballot."
If the group has collected enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot, it won’t be voted on until November of next year (2012.) And that means restrictions on early voting and the elimination of the so called golden week that are part of this reform law will not be in place for next year’s Presidential election.