The AI boom was on 41 ballots this week. Voters let it win once

On Tuesday the AI boom was on the ballot 41 times, in towns and counties across 10 states. By Wednesday morning, with most of the counting done, Scientific American's tally had it winning exactly once.

That one win came in Harwood, North Dakota, and even there it needs an asterisk. Nobody in Harwood was asked whether they wanted a data center. One was already going up: Polaris Forge 2, a $3 billion campus near the city. The question was a charter amendment that would have forced an independent review and a public hearing before the city approved large industrial projects in future. According to the North Dakota secretary of state's office, as reported by Route Fifty, 75% of the 430 people who voted said no.

Everywhere else, the people who would have to live next to the server farms said no to them.

Ohio went first and went hardest

Ohio had more of these fights than anywhere. Fortune counted 21 data center measures across 18 municipalities, more than half the national total. The state already has more than 200 operational data centers and, per the Ohio Capital Journal figures Fortune cites, 125 local moratoriums on building more. Tuesday added to the pile.

In Trenton, a ban aimed at an 18-building Amazon Web Services development passed 80% to 20%. In Wilmington, around 80% of voters rejected rezoning in four separate referendums meant to clear four rural residential plots for a data center. In the village of Perry, more than 87% approved a rule that developers chasing tax breaks must give the village financial guarantees first. Sunbury appears to have passed a charter amendment banning facilities that draw 25 megawatts or more, a measure pointed squarely at a possible Amazon hyperscale project. Pataskala approved a charter ban on large data centers. Ashville voted to block a campus that is already under construction.

Fortune reported that all five communities in central Ohio with data center questions on the ballot voted against them. Route Fifty put it more bluntly: in every Ohio race, the opponents appear to have won.

The industry did try. DeSmog found that a group called Build American AI spent at least $2.54 million on Ohio TV ads between September 7 and October 21, running on 16 channels and claiming data centers had brought the state $40 billion in investment and more than 95,000 jobs. Fortune ties Build American AI to Leading the Future, a super PAC it says is funded by Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman.

Keith Durkin, who runs the Ohio Northern University Institute for Civics and Public Policy, apparently never saw any of it.

"I've never seen any pro-data center advertising. I've never seen any op-eds from the industry," he told Fortune.

His institute's polling of 1,650 Ohio adults found 55% opposed data center construction in the state and only 22% supported it. On tax breaks for the companies, 65% were against. And 57% said they would vote for a proposed constitutional amendment banning new large data centers over 25 megawatts. Route Fifty reports that a statewide amendment along those lines could reach the ballot next year.

The Senate race fit the pattern. Democrat Sherrod Brown, who wanted to end tax breaks for data center companies and make them pay for their own utility upgrades, beat Republican Senator Jon Husted, who supported the breaks.

Maine, Kansas, California

Outside Ohio the margins were just as lopsided. In Wells, Maine, more than 80% of voters approved a retroactive 180-day moratorium on data center development, per Scientific American. Emporia, Kansas passed a ban on "high impact data centers" with just over 60% of the vote. Route Fifty reports the definition covers any facility built mainly to house servers that needs a peak load above 10 megawatts or draws more than 100,000 gallons of water a day. That wording is broad enough to catch crypto miners and AI training clusters along with ordinary cloud buildings.

In Alhambra, in Los Angeles County, preliminary results show voters on track for a citywide ban. Its neighbor Monterey Park did the same thing in June, in what Route Fifty describes as apparently the first vote of its kind in the country. Port Washington, Wisconsin, voted in April to make tax-increment financing for large projects subject to approval at the ballot box.

Not every one of these votes binds anybody. Route Fifty notes some were advisory, which means local officials can read the result and ignore it. That is a choice an elected official can make exactly once.

"Voters across the country have emphatically rejected the push for AI data centers," said Mitch Jones, deputy director of the nonprofit Food and Water Action. He has an obvious stake in saying so. The numbers back him up anyway.

So does national polling. Gallup found in May that about 70% of Americans opposed a data center in their own area. NBC's exit polls found 56% of voters said AI and data centers were at least a major factor in how they voted, and 64% of that group backed Democrats. Scientific American points out that three newly elected Democratic governors, Gina Hinojosa in Texas, Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia and Amy Acton in Ohio, all campaigned on regulating the buildout. Texas alone accounts for about a quarter of the U.S. data center capacity now in the pipeline.

Ben Green, who teaches public policy at the University of Michigan, described the grievance to Fortune as "massive corporations coming in and forcing a community to deal with some type of project." That is most of the story in one sentence. Plenty of the people voting no use chatbots every day. What they object to is a windowless warehouse that hums all night, drinks the aquifer and shows up on their power bill.

AI data center stocks fell on Wednesday. The money noticed. The question now is whether the companies notice that the cheapest land and the friendliest zoning boards are turning out to be the places with the angriest voters, and that "we'll bring jobs" is a pitch Ohio has now heard on 16 channels and voted against anyway.

Sources: Scientific American, Route Fifty, Fortune.