Thursday, October 29th, 2026

Welcome to Thursday’s edition of The Pennant. To listen to this newsletter, click the “Listen Online” link in the top right corner of this email.

On this day in 1998, Ohio Sen. John Glenn, 77, became the oldest person in space, returning aboard Discovery 36 years after becoming the first American to orbit Earth.

Top of the Fold today: Photo ID on the ballot, a Supreme Court that could go 7-0 Republican, and four Ohio streets on Reese’s best trick-or-treat list.

And what the “Black October” internet warning could mean for you, plus why Ohio’s gas tax holiday feels like a sugar high about to crash.

COLUMBUS — Ohio voters will decide Tuesday whether to write the state’s photo ID requirement into the Ohio Constitution. 

Issue 3, the only statewide question on the ballot, would enshrine a rule already in law: Ohioans must show photo ID to vote in person. 

Supporters say putting it in the constitution sets a floor future lawmakers can’t roll back. Democrats generally oppose it, arguing it’s meant to boost turnout for the majority party. 

The ballot language and arguments for and against are posted online.

COLUMBUS — Two Ohio Supreme Court seats are on Tuesday’s ballot, and the results could leave the court entirely Republican. 

Justice Jennifer Brunner, the court’s lone Democrat, faces former Franklin County Judge Colleen O’Donnell. 

Republican Justice Dan Hawkins faces appeals court Judge Marilyn Zayas of Cincinnati. 

Republicans have won all six Supreme Court races since party labels were added to the ballot in 2022. 

Most unions back Brunner, while business groups, police and Ohio Right to Life back O’Donnell.

LAKEWOOD — As many Ohio communities hold Beggars’ Night tonight, four of the state’s streets have made Reese’s list of the 150 best trick-or-treating streets in America. 

Lakewood’s Webb Road and Cleveland Heights’ Scarborough Road made the list, Cleveland 19 reported, along with Bryden Road in Columbus and Floral Avenue in Cincinnati. 

The candy maker scored streets on “haul” and “haunt.” Scarborough Road earned a near-perfect 97.5 for haunt, and Reese’s said it “proves that yardwork can be terrifying.” 

The full list is posted online.

WASHINGTON — Artificial intelligence keeps getting smarter. So do the people trying to break the internet with it.

Security flaws in software that runs up to 70% of the world’s websites have set off online warnings of a possible “black swan” event, or a rare shock nobody sees coming. So far, the worst hasn’t happened. The flaws, dubbed PHP2Shell, let hackers take over unprotected web servers and steal customer data, CBS News reported.

Researchers found the flaws using artificial intelligence. On Monday, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency confirmed hackers are actively exploiting them and ordered federal agencies to patch them by today. Governments in Europe and Japan issued similar warnings, and some sites, including Archive.org, briefly went dark.

Some tech insiders have posted advice to withdraw cash and stock up on food, but there’s no sign of bank runs or shortages, and officials haven’t reported a widespread breach. Visiting a website is unlikely to infect your device. The bigger risk is a breach at a company holding your data, so watch for suspicious emails and texts.

Ohio’s 90-day gas tax holiday was sold to us as relief at the pump. More than three weeks into this tax sabbatical, prices have climbed anyway, and statewide averages are back above the national average.

As The Pennant reported yesterday, the latest jump came after ExxonMobil took a key unit offline at its Joliet, Ill., refinery and maintenance at a Cenovus refinery in Ohio squeezed regional supply. That sent the state average from $4.05 to $4.34 a gallon in a single day.

No tax holiday can fix a refinery outage.

Meanwhile, back at the Statehouse, Gov. Mike DeWine insists suspending the 38.5-cent gas tax and 47-cent diesel tax is helping. But even he concedes it’s “difficult to know for sure” whether the full savings reach consumers.

And the holiday came with a hefty price tag. Lawmakers moved $725 million from the state’s general revenue surplus to cover the lost revenue. That’s taxpayer money recycled into a temporary discount whose timing, weeks before an election, is hard to miss.

Both candidates for governor, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy and Democrat Amy Acton, embraced the idea. It feels less like sound policy and more like a pre-election giveaway Ohioans will pay for down the line.

Besides a couple of broken refineries, the forces driving prices up are the war with Iran and volatile oil markets. Sadly, both are beyond Ohio’s control. And the tax holiday ends after the election. Unless the war ends and oil markets settle by then, prices could leap overnight when the tax returns.

Hindsight is an editorial staff’s right, so let’s use some here. If Ohio has $725 million to spare, wouldn’t it be better to give it back through lower property taxes or across-the-board tax cuts for families? In other words, something people can count on, not a campaign-season gift.

Or here’s a novel idea: Keep it for roads and bridges, which is what the gas tax is for in the first place.

Ohioans don’t need a sugar high at the pump. They need a state government that knows the difference between a gimmick and a policy.

This editorial reflects the views of The Pennant Editorial Board. Questions or comments are welcome at [email protected].

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