Voters Reject Data Center Plans, Check Developers’ Reach

Residents in Ashville, Ohio, rejected a resolution approving terms for EdgeConneX to build two data center buildings on 195 acres, while voters in Joliet Township, Illinois, turned down a measure concerning AI data center construction. The proposals hit a local wall. But neither vote was binding, leaving the decisions in the hands of political officials and the institutions with authority over development.

The People Said No—Nonbinding

In Ashville, residents voted against the resolution tied to EdgeConneX’s proposed development. The plan covered two data center buildings on 195 acres. That is the specific project the ballot measure addressed; the vote did not approve it.

In Joliet Township, southwest of Chicago, voters rejected a measure asking whether the city council should approve construction of AI data centers. The question placed a limit on what voters could decide directly: residents could register opposition, but the measure itself did not bind the council. The article reports no further action by the council, and the vote alone doesn’t settle what happens next.

Both measures were non-binding. That distinction is the fine print between public opposition and public control. Residents cast votes against data center-related measures, but the results did not legally compel officials to follow them. The people who live with the local consequences spoke; the institutional process kept the final authority elsewhere.

The Costs Behind the Backlash

The votes came amid what CNBC described as a broad AI backlash. A Pew Research survey over the summer showed that Americans had soured on data centers because of their environmental and energy costs. Those concerns put the resource demands of data center development at the center of the public dispute, rather than treating construction as a decision affecting developers and officials alone.

The available account doesn’t detail the specific environmental or energy costs in Ashville or Joliet Township, and it doesn’t identify individual residents’ reasons for voting no. It does connect wider public skepticism about those costs with the two local votes. The people at the bottom of the decision-making ladder are being asked to absorb the consequences of infrastructure decisions; in these cases, voters used the ballot to register resistance.

The source describes no community mutual-aid effort, direct action outside the voting process, or horizontal organizing. It reports two votes, and no more. That absence matters: there’s no evidence here of a self-organized alternative to the proposed data centers, or of residents gaining direct authority over the projects.

Politicians Hear the Message, Not a Mandate

Jim Bianco of Bianco Research wrote in a post on X: “These are non-binding measures, but given the size of the Democrats' victory, adding Texas governorship, and a 29 to 1 lead to restrict data centers, politicians that want to remain employed as politicians are going to heed these messages,” The quotation frames the votes as a signal politicians may heed, not as a binding order from residents.

That’s the limit built into this electoral channel. The source gives no additional details about the Democrats’ victory, the Texas governorship, or the 29-to-1 figure, so those claims remain Bianco’s words rather than a fuller account of the results. What the article does establish is plain: voters rejected both measures, both were non-binding, and data center development remains subject to decisions by political institutions. Public dissent reached the ballot. The ballot did not transfer authority.