Marc Dann is a former Ohio attorney general.
Something is happening in Ohio that should alarm every citizen who values self-governance.
AI oligarchs who have consolidated unprecedented economic power are working hand in glove with compliant elected officials to dismantle the very constitutional safeguards Ohioans fought to establish more than a century ago: the referendum, the initiative petition and the right of municipalities to govern themselves through home rule charters.
At Ohio's 1912 Constitutional Convention, reformers fed up with corrupt legislatures beholden to railroad barons enshrined the tools of direct democracy in the state constitution.
The initiative petition lets citizens propose their own laws. The referendum gave them the power to reject legislation forced upon them. And home rule charter authority empowered cities and villages to govern themselves without begging permission from Columbus. These were a direct response to the failures of representative government when representatives stopped representing the people.
Today, echoes of that history are being heard around Ohio.
The robber barons of the Gilded Age have been replaced by tech billionaires whose AI empires generate wealth that would make Rockefeller blush and who are leveraging that wealth to capture the political process. The cases are not hypothetical. They are in court right now.
In the village of Ashville, residents collected 875 signatures on a referendum petition challenging a resolution approving a development agreement with EdgeConneX for a massive data center and gas-fired power facility on nearly 200 acres.
The Pickaway County Board of Elections certified 669 valid signatures, far exceeding the 498 required. Yet the village fiscal officer rejected the petition as "insufficient and invalid," claiming the resolution was both an emergency measure and an administrative action not subject to referendum.
The citizens were forced to file a writ of mandamus in the Ohio Supreme Court − Case No. 2026-0906 − just to vindicate their right to vote.
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In the city of Trenton, residents gathered 464 signatures to amend their city charter to prohibit data center construction, a direct exercise of home rule authority under Article XVIII of the Ohio Constitution.
The Butler County Board of Elections validated 336 signatures, nearly three times the 128 required. But the city council passed an emergency ordinance redefining "10% of the electors" to inflate the threshold from 128 to 820, contradicting more than 50 years of Ohio Supreme Court precedent.
Those citizens, too, were forced to the Ohio upreme Court −Case No. 2026-1035 −, seeking a writ of mandamus to compel their own elected officials to put the question on the November 2026 ballot.
The playbook is disturbingly familiar.
Pass resolutions as sham emergencies to circumvent the referendum power. Redefine statutory terms to inflate signature thresholds. Lobby the Legislature to pre-empt local control. And when citizens dare to exercise their charter authority, exhaust their resources with litigation they cannot afford. In both Ashville and Trenton, officials who swore oaths to uphold the Ohio Constitution have used their offices to obstruct the very democratic processes that the Constitution guarantees.
This is not about being anti-technology.
Ohio can and should be part of the AI future. But development must happen with the consent of the governed, not by gutting the constitutional mechanisms that exist precisely to check concentrated power.
Ohio's elected officials have a choice. They can honor the legacy of the 1912 reformers who understood that democracy requires more than casting a vote every few years. Or they can continue to roll over for oligarchs who view local democracy as an obstacle to be engineered away like any other inefficiency in their business model.
The initiative petition, the referendum and municipal home rule are not relics of a bygone era.
They are living instruments of self-governance that exist because Ohioans once had the wisdom to distrust unchecked power, whether it wore a top hat or a Patagonia vest. If we allow these tools to be neutralized by the wealthiest interests of our time, we will have surrendered something no algorithm can restore: the right of a free people to govern themselves.
The question is not whether Ohio will embrace the future. It is whether Ohio's future will have any room left for democracy.
Former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann is admitted to practice law in the state of Ohio; the U.S. District Courts for the Northern and Southern Districts of Ohio; the Northern District of Illinois; the Northern District of Indiana; and the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohioans' rights are being crushed to please data center oligarchs | Ex-attorney general