Catching Our Eye News Roundup, Sept. 2, 2026

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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Catching Our Eye

• Issue 3. Signal Ohio’s Andrew Tobias is reporting, “What is Issue 3? Ohio’s voter ID amendment, explained.”

  Ohio Republicans held a call to action over the weekend – urging voters to show their support for President Donald Trump by approving Issue 3.

  At an event in suburban Columbus, Republicans compared Issue 3, the only statewide question on Ohio’s ballot this November, to the SAVE America Act, a federal bill that would require all Americans to prove their citizenship in order to register to vote. The federal bill, which also has a voter ID component, is Trump’s top legislative priority and is being blocked by Democrats in the U.S. Senate.

  “They can’t pass the Save America Act. OK, fine,” Ohio Republican Party Chairman Alex Triantafilou said at a pro-Issue 3 Saturday event that also featured Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and U.S. Sen. Jon Husted. “But you know what we can do in Ohio? We can pass Issue 3.”

• Data Centers. The Statehouse News Bureau’s Karen Kasler is reporting, “Data center ban in southwest Ohio city must go before voters, says Ohio Supreme Court.”

  The Ohio Supreme Court is ordering a southwest Ohio city to let voters decide on a ban on data centers. The unanimous decision to put the ban before voters in Trenton near Cincinnati comes in the second case the court considered on data centers in the last month.

  There are two proposed data centers planned for Trenton, and there’s the possibility of a third coming. Five Trenton residents wanted to amend the city’s charter to include a ban on construction of new data centers, so they circulated a petition and submitted a ban on data centers to Trenton City Council in July. The city charter requires the petition be signed by 10% of the electors of the municipality. The Butler County Board of Elections said there were 1,277 residents who voted in the general election on Nov. 4, 2025, and that the residents had 336 valid signatures. Residents said that was more than twice the 128 signatures they needed.

• Measles. The Atlantic’s Tom Bartlett is reporting, “The Measles-stricken mother who lost her newborn son.”

  When the Amish man emerged from his barn to greet me, he had no idea that his newborn son’s death had become national news. The man wore a straw hat, black trousers, and suspenders over a long-sleeved blue shirt; one of his similarly dressed sons was guiding a horse-drawn plow in a nearby field.

  The man told me that, like most Amish people, he and his family don’t watch TV or use the internet. They don’t read the newspaper either. So they didn’t know until I told them that last Tuesday, Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, held a press conference to announce the first two “measles-associated” deaths in the state in 35 years. Both of the people who died were from Lancaster County, which is home to the largest Amish community in the country and has been hardest hit by the state’s months-long measles outbreak.