The Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Thursday to order a new trial in a case where the lower court allowed closed-door meetings about whether to buy new voting machines from Dominion Voter Systems in 2020 and 2021.
The law allows closed-door executive meetings for three reasons: “To consider the purchase of property for public purposes, the sale of property at competitive bidding, or the sale or other disposition of unneeded, obsolete, or unfit-for-use property in accordance with (state law), if premature disclosure of information would give an unfair competitive or bargaining advantage to a person whose personal, private interest is adverse to the general public interest.”
The court said it used grammar to decide the ruling.
“We apply the ordinary rules of grammar – specifically, the rules of punctuation – to determine the plain meaning of (the ORC provisions on executive sessions),” Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy wrote in the opinion. “In doing so, we conclude that the premature-disclosure clause applies to all the permissible reasons listed in the provision for entering executive session.”
The appeals court had said the premature disclosure clause only applied to the third reason--the disposition of obsolete property.
With this new interpretation, the supreme court sent the case back down to the Stark County Court of Common Pleas to be looked at again.
The county did buy the machines after a judge in a separate lawsuit ordered them to.
The lawsuit was brought by Look Ahead America, a group in D.C. that has also advocated for January 6 defendants.
Dominion Voting Systems has been the target of accusations that its voting machines got President Joe Biden elected by allowing votes to be changed fraudulently.
Full disclosure, they won over $700 million dollars in a defamation lawsuit from Fox News, so at least one court felt they were maligned unfairly.
Other lawsuits are still pending.
But millions of Republicans still believe something is fishy there, and a lot of them would oppose their county buying new ones. Hence the secrecy--but that's not how local government is supposed to work.
Just because one party believes the other one is misinformed doesn't make it right for the other one to go behind their backs and do what they want anyway.
Time for a do-over--but how many more times are the courts going to have to correct these overreaching, tyrannical regimes before they change their ways? That's the question.
