CINCINNATI – A federal judge on Friday struck down Ohio’s law barring people from knowingly or recklessly making false statements about candidates in a case that the U.S. Supreme Court said needed to be heard.
U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Black ruled that Ohio’s law is unconstitutional and prohibited the Ohio Elections Commission and its members from enforcing the law.
The judge said in his ruling that the answer to false statements in politics is “not to force silence, but to encourage truthful speech in response, and to let the voters, not the government, decide what the political truth is.”
“Ohio’s false-statements laws do not accomplish this, and the court is not empowered to re-write the statutes; that is the job of the Legislature,” Black wrote.
The Supreme Court in June found unanimously that an anti-abortion group should be able to challenge the law, in a case that grew out of a 2010 congressional race. The Susan B. Anthony List has contended that the Ohio statute violates free speech rights and chills a wide variety of political speech.