The Ohio Supreme Court has ordered a town council to place a ban on data centers on the ballot.

In the Southwest Ohio town of Trenton, Barry Blankenship and four other residents filed a petition for a proposed charter amendment to prohibit the construction of data centers.

The town council rejected the petition in August, stating that the number of valid signatures did not equal “10 percent of the electors.”

Council defined an elector as a “person having the qualifications provided by law to be entitled to vote.”

The petitioners took the case to the Ohio Supreme Court, arguing that the “electors” were the people who voted in the last election.

The justices agreed and ordered the Trenton Town Council to pass an ordinance to certify the proposal to the Butler County Board of Elections at a special election.

According to the elections board, the petition had 336 valid signatures. In 2025, a total of 1,277 out of the 8,197 registered voters came out for the 2025 election.

The justices noted that they had granted a motion from Trenton Data Center Campus LLC, “an entity constructing a data center in Trenton,” to intervene in the case.

The state’s highest court sided with the petitioners, citing the prevailing rule from a 1996 case in the town of West Jefferson. It stated that the number of necessary signatures “shall be based upon the total vote cast at the last preceding general municipal election.”

The petitioners only need 128 signatures, and they passed that total by more than 200.

“Therefore, the citizens are “entitled to a limited writ of mandamus ordering the council to pass an ordinance certifying the petition to the board of elections for submission of the proposed charter amendment to electors at a special election within the time frame stated in Article XVIII, Section 8 of the Ohio Constitution,” the justices wrote.