Don’t tinker with Ohio’s Statuary elections

COLUMBUS

I’m trying to figure out what lessons schoolchildren have learned from the process employed to select Ohio’s next representative in the National Statuary Hall.

You will recall a couple of years ago, when lawmakers, with the help of the Ohio Historical Society, launched a special election to pick which prominent Ohioans should be featured in the U.S. Capitol exhibit.

Each state has two statues (images and information on each are available online at www.aoc.gov).

Ohio is represented by President James A. Garfield, “the last American president to be born in a log cabin,” according to the Capitol site. He was assassinated in 1881; his statue has been in place since 1886.

The other statue is former one-term governor and congressman William Allen, who died in 1879. He is credited with coining the political slogan “Fifty-Four/Forty or Fight.” He’s also viewed as a supporter of slavery, which doesn’t sit right with some Ohioans today.

The federal government allows states to replace older statues with new ones, so Ohio lawmakers launched a process to determine a more suitable representative of the state’s values and accomplishments.

A legislative panel considered more than 90 famous Ohioans before deciding on 10 finalists: inventors Wilbur and Orville Wright and Thomas Edison, congressman and abolitionist James Ashley, president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant, civil rights leader William McCulloch, Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens, space shuttle astronaut Judith Resnik, oral polio vaccine creator Albert Sabin, abolitionist and author Harriet Beecher Stowe, and women’s suffragist Harriet Taylor Upton of Warren.

A special election took place, and school kids were encouraged to participate. Many of those youngsters cast ballots and submitted testimony to the Legislature about their choices. It seemed like a big deal at the time, with lawmakers saying they would consider residents’ input in their final decision.

THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN

Thomas Edison won, followed by the Wright Brothers, prompting a heated debate about which inventors were more deserving of the honor.

Sen. Mark Wagoner, the Toledo Republican who shepherded the issue, offered legislation early last year solidifying Edison’s selection, and the Ohio Senate unanimously passed that bill a year ago.

It has since stalled in the Ohio House.

There are a couple of directions this controversy can take, with decidedly different lessons for the schoolchildren who participated in the process.

Lawmakers could stop stalling and pass what should be a simple, slam-dunk bill, showing kids the way elections are supposed to work. There was a contest, people who chose to participate submitted ballots, and there was a winner.

On the flip side, lawmakers could continue to postpone action on the bill, allowing it to die or maybe creating a new task force to further study potential statue candidates.

That would send the message that elections sometimes don’t really matter and politicians can refrain from making decisions even after a majority of people who chose to participate in the process have spoken.

Marc Kovac is The Vindicator’s Statehouse correspondent. Email him at mkovac@dixcom.com or on Twitter or at OhioCapitalBlog.