Confusing ballot wording may have tipped Ohio vote on renewables ban

May 12, 2026

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Confusing ballot language could be the reason an Ohio county upheld a ban on renewable energy last week.

An early analysis of exit poll responses suggests a majority of voters likely meant to vote against Richland County’s ban on most large solar and wind projects for 11 of its 18 townships. But the ballot’s wording perplexed enough of them to have flipped the results.

That preliminary finding doesn’t change the outcome of the May 5 Richland County election. The final tally was 53% “yes” votes to keep the ban versus 47% “no” votes to axe it. But the poll sheds light on how people in the county really felt and can inform future work to roll back clean energy restrictions in Ohio and beyond.

Richland County’s referendum drew national attention because it was a rare case of residents pushing back against limits on solar and wind power. Such state and local restrictions have grown dramatically across the U.S. in recent years.

Meanwhile, skyrocketing demand for electricity is fueling an affordability crisis. Solar and wind, and batteries to store their energy, can generally come online more quickly than natural gas plants to meet some of that demand. Renewables also aren’t subject to fluctuating fuel costs, and they increase competition in electricity markets, which can rein in power prices.

Richland County’s three commissioners relied on a 2021 state law, Senate Bill 52, to pass the restrictions last July. Local residents who opposed the ban quickly began pushing to put it to a vote. SB 52 states that for any referendum against a county’s ban, its commissioners’ resolution needs a majority vote in favor to go into effect.

So, a “yes” vote means someone opposes the referendum effort to overturn the ban, while a “no” vote means the person backs the campaign to get rid of the ban.

“It’s confusing,” County Commissioner Cliff Mears told Canary Media in March when explaining his support against the referendum and for the ban.

Lots of voters may have been confused, too — about one in five across all political groups, according to early analysis of the exit surveys completed by 1,193 of the 23,042 people who voted on the issue. “When we model what the result would have looked like if everyone had voted their stated preference, the outcome flips,” to 54% wanting to reverse the ban and 46% wanting to keep it, said Graham Diedrich, a University of Michigan Ph.D. candidate who oversaw the exit polling at a dozen locations across Richland County.

A bar chart from Graham Diedrich shows how results on the Richland County referendum may have flipped if the ballot language hadn’t confused voters. (Graham Diedrich)

“We anticipated this would be an issue,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, an organizing group that assisted Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development with the “no” campaign. “I think we did the best we could on educating folks on this very complicated ballot language.”

Misunderstanding went beyond the ballot language, said Brian McPeek, one of the local leaders for the vote-no group. Those in favor of the ban suggested that repealing it would open the floodgates for projects to come into the area, McPeek said. In fact, the county would simply have returned to the prior system of accepting or rejecting most new solar and wind farms on a case-by-case basis before the projects head to the Ohio Power Siting Board for state permitting.

To further complicate matters, supporters of the renewable energy restrictions tried to cast the referendum effort as driven by outside interests, pointing to the New York headquarters for the NRDC Action Fund, which provided advertising for the campaign.

However, all decision-making for the campaign was handled by local leaders, stressed Bogin at Ohio Citizen Action. People from Ohio Citizen Action and the NRDC Action Fund identified their organizations at public town hall meetings. And Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development disclosed both groups clearly on its finance report. The finance report for the campaign to maintain the ban didn’t highlight its connections to cheerleaders for the natural gas industry, such as The Empowerment Alliance. Canary Media and the Energy and Policy Institute publicized those links only after connecting the dots from other public records and emails.

Bigger picture, Ohio’s preference for fossil fuels is causing renewable energy companies to take many projects elsewhere, said Michael Benson, president of the board of directors for Green Energy Ohio, an industry association. “We are losing out on the economic development potential solar provides to a state in desperate need of more energy for our grid.”

The campaign against the ban did not explicitly stress renewable energy’s role in limiting climate change and its impacts. Yet concern about a warming planet seemed to factor into residents’ votes.

“Voters who were very worried about climate change backed repeal at 75%, while those not at all worried backed the ban at the same rate,” Diedrich said. Separate responses to a 2025 survey analyzed by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that 53% of people in Richland County said they were worried about climate change. That’s close to the 54% of exit-poll respondents whose answers suggested they opposed the ban.

Party affiliation was also a factor, with 72% of Republicans voting for the ban and 76% of Democrats voting against it. However, Richland County is home to far more Republicans, who outnumber Democrats by more than 3 to 1, meaning many must have voted against the ban in order for the final results to be so close.

“One of the biggest lessons from this campaign is just how important sustained local organizing and trusted community voices are in conversations around energy and land use,” Bogin said. In her view, the movement to reverse the ban in Richland County got as much support as it did “because the people making the case were neighbors talking to neighbors.” She remains hopeful that other efforts to reverse prohibitions on clean energy may succeed, and thinks the campaign could trigger a larger discussion at the statehouse about the hurdles SB 52 creates for renewables, which don’t apply to either fossil fuel or nuclear projects.

Although the campaign did not overturn the ban, Diedrich noted that 90% of survey respondents were aware of the renewables referendum before casting their ballot. To him, that shows the group effectively educated voters, despite the “structural” problem of the ballot wording.

McPeek said he still feels that most people will ultimately come out against blanket prohibitions on solar and wind when they get all the facts. And adoption of a prohibition against solar and wind does not mean it will go on forever.

“The question of who gets to decide what happens on private land in Richland County did not end tonight,” Morgan Carroll, another leader in the campaign against the ban, said in a statement after the vote was tallied on Election Day. “We will continue to stand with farmers and landowners who believe that right belongs to them, not to their government and certainly not to the fossil fuel industry.”

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