ODP Chair Liz Walters statement: Despite Governor Mike DeWine (R) calling a special session of the state legislature, we have no confidence that a clean bill will be produced to get the President on the ballot. Ensuring ballot access for President Biden is just too important to leave it in the dysfunctional hands of the Ohio GOP. Today the DNC announced plans to certify President Biden and Vice President Harris through an internal party process. DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison has our full support in this effort, and we will continue to work closely with our colleagues at the DNC and on the Biden Campaign in the weeks ahead.
“In addition to being an unprecedented distraction,
this petty partisanship is bound to fail.
Both candidates will inevitably be on the ballot; the only real question is whether
Ohio’s legislators and secretary of state will feel any shame for
lighting their constituents’ tax dollars on fire in the meantime.”
~~~Justin Levitt,
law professor at Loyola Marymount University
It is beyond time for ALL Ohioans to hold the Ohio Republicans accountable.
Ohio Republicans have wasted Ohioans tax dollars:
Ohio’s August 2022 second primary election (approximately $25 million)
for a vote on unconstitutional Statehouse districts designed to give
unfair advantage to Republicans over Democrats in rigged elections;
an August 2023 special election (approximately $20 million)
which they outlawed January 2023.
The GOP is not the party of law and order, small government
nor conservative fiscal responsibility.
It is the Party of Trump:
lawlessness, election denial and lying, government intrusion
and lower taxes for the wealthy 1% and corporations
while adding $8.4 TRILLION to the national debt within 4 years.
The only trickle-down effect Ohioans have experienced is
the continual dysfunction and intra-party fighting that
is afflicting the Republican party at all levels.
“It is unimaginable that a major party candidate for president would be kept off the ballot in a context like Ohio has created, without any legitimate reason, and when literally every other state has come around. So in addition to being an unprecedented distraction, this petty partisanship is bound to fail. Both candidates will inevitably be on the ballot; the only real question is whether Ohio’s legislators and secretary of state will feel any shame for lighting their constituents’ tax dollars on fire in the meantime.”
- Because of the partisan obstructionism of Ohio Republicans, the DNC will move to conduct virtual party proceedings to certify President Biden and Vice President Harris as the Democratic Party nominees before Ohio’s August 7 deadline, and before our in-person Convention programming beginning August 19.
- We’ve done this before. There is strong, effective precedent for this process – these virtual party proceedings will closely mirror the successful process used in the 2020 convention.
- Conducting a virtual roll call will require the following steps:
-
- 1) The Rules and Bylaws Committee will vote on Tuesday, June 4 on a resolution to propose changes to the Call to allow for virtual party proceedings:
- 2) In the coming weeks, the resolution will be voted on by the full DNC membership.
- 3) Once the resolution is adopted, the remainder of the pre-nomination process will follow the standard order of operations.
- In spite of Republicans’ bad-faith efforts to stand in the way, the in-person Convention in Chicago will continue to serve as an important convening event for Democrats across the country.
—
Liz Walters
Chair
Ohio Democratic Party
With unending petulance,
gerrymandered Ohio Republicans
decline simple Biden ballot solution
Commentary: Marilou Johanek | Ohio Capital Journal | 5.14.2024
What a joke. In a pique of partisan petulance, the gerrymandered-for-life Republican supermajorities in the Ohio Statehouse have visited yet another national embarrassment on the state. “I think we’ve officially sunk lower than Alabama at this point,” Ohio House Minority Leader Allison Russo, D-Upper Arlington, dryly observed about the state’s descent into autocratic hell. The latest humiliation from Columbus making headlines was entirely self-inflicted by MAGA-pandering pols.
Our lovely legislative overlords torpedoed what should have been an easy bipartisan fix to a ballot scheduling snafu that still threatens to keep President Joe Biden off the general election ballot in Ohio. Ballot adjustment in a presidential election year is a non-issue. But Republican lawmakers decided to make it one by picking a fight and stomping their feet when things didn’t go their way. Like toddlers who need a nap.
The straightforward legislation the GOP-controlled Ohio Senate and Ohio House blew up (for no good reason) would have remedied a problem with candidate filing deadlines in state election law that has come up before in presidential election years with Democrats and Republicans. It has typically been resolved as a bipartisan matter without incident. Until now. (Hence the Russo observation).
Apparently, the task of passing a clean, standalone bill to temporarily or permanently change a state deadline for certifying presidential candidates (and ensure Biden makes the fall ballot) is too much to ask of the kiddos running the General Assembly. Instead, they inserted an unrelated, partisan-driven proposal into the bill adjusting ballot deadlines knowing full well their poison pill would sink it. And it did.
That kind of rank partisanship didn’t rear its ugly head in Ohio when the same ballot obstacle came up in 2012 and 2020. Legislators did the right thing. They ensured ballot access for the presumptive presidential nominees even though both major parties’ national conventions were held after Ohio’s filing cutoff (90 days before an election) for presidential candidates to be certified for the ballot. Lawmakers passed temporary fixes to relax pre-convention deadlines for candidate certification and called it a day.
This year, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Biden will be formally nominated, starts 12 days after Ohio’s August 7 candidate deadline to appear on the general election ballot. Other states with early filing dates for presidential tickets similar to Ohio’s, including (believe it or not) Alabama, have already enacted exceptions to their election rules to accommodate the DNC.
The Republican-dominated Alabama legislature recently approved the changes without a dissenting vote to guarantee Biden access to the ballot. As a matter of principle. “This is nothing new,” said the Alabama Republican House speaker. “We just needed to fix this so the president can be on the ballot, like our nominee can be on the ballot.” Nothing so honorable for the Republican-dominated Ohio legislature. Right-wingers preferred to go low and leverage Biden’s ballot predicament in the state for partisan gain.
Senate Republicans were more inclined to extract political paybacks from Democrats than to serve the greater good of the electorate. Senate President Matt Huffman conspired to get even with the winning sides in last year’s two statewide initiatives with a spurious last-minute rider to an agreed upon ballot adjustment bill that would ban foreign money from state ballot campaigns. Stick with me.
The GOP rush to enact the ban was a disingenuous political maneuver from the start. State Republicans discovered a Swiss billionaire living in Wyoming who has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to progressive, nonprofit organizations that back liberal causes. The billionaire gave money to one group which in turn gave money to the pro-Issue 1 campaign in Ohio that successfully enshrined abortion rights in the Ohio Constitution. Bingo.
Foreign nationals are already banned from contributing to candidates but state Republicans made the Swiss billionaire their new boogeyman because his contributions may have indirectly helped pass ballot issues in Ohio that protected reproductive freedoms and majority voting rights — opposed by the senators demanding the ban. Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, D-Lakewood, summed up the transparent charade of Republicans perfectly.
“I think it’s a ‘sore loser bill’ because they lost a couple of times at the ballot this past year,” said Antonio. “It was, frankly, a dirty trick and we didn’t take the bait.” Huffman made a partisan ploy the price Democrats would have to pay to ensure ballot access for their presidential candidate.
Outrageous.
The Senate leader went so far as to suggest that GOP lawmakers in both the state Senate and House required an incentive to vote for accommodating the president’s nominating convention schedule with a deadline exception. Does it escape him that Biden won 87% of the vote in Ohio’s Democratic primary? Don’t Democratic voters in Ohio count as an incentive for the legislature to do the right thing?
Not to Huffman. He was willing to deny those Ohioans a vote for their candidate by gumming up a previously apolitical process to change ballot deadlines for presidential candidates of both parties. Republican House Speaker Jason Stephens, mired in a ridiculously fractious caucus, just threw in the towel. He adjourned session without voting on a bill or delivering on promises made with Huffman to solve an easy problem. What a joke.
A national embarrassment. Again.
The Petty Political Theatrics Ohio Republicans
are Playing About Biden Being on the Ballot
Commentary: David DeWitt | Ohio Capital Journal | 4.18.2024
But Biden will be on the Ohio ballot. Most likely, national Democrats will have to hold a virtual mini-convention earlier than their Chicago convention, and the problem is solved. In 2012 and 2020, Ohio faced this same situation for both parties and lawmakers made temporary extensions to solve deadline problems. In 2024, Ohio Republican politicians are apparently just being as petty as possible.
Conventions used to matter in America. In fact, some of the most fascinating political history of our country can be found in the intrigue surrounding brokered conventions in the 19th Century and first half of the 20th. But the last brokered convention we’ve had was back in 1952. And in those days, conventions were held in June or July.
Since then, conventions have become mostly pro forma affairs: Candidates wrap up their nominations by securing the required number of delegates during the spring primary process. The parties have often pushed their conventions back to August or even September in order to shrink the length of the true general election campaign down to under three months.
As conventions have been pushed back, this has become a problem with Ohio’s 90-day requirement, changed from 75 days in 2010. In 2012, when Mitt Romney and Barack Obama faced this situation, lawmakers passed a temporary deadline change. They did the same thing when it happened again in 2020 for Donald Trump and Joe Biden. They even included that change in the 2019 state budget.
This time around, however, the 2024 Republican National Convention is being held in mid-July, before the deadline, while the 2024 Democratic National Convention is scheduled for the third week in August, after the deadline.
Ohio’s temporary extension did not appear again in 2023, even though the convention dates and location were announced that April. Ohio Democratic lawmakers and their attorneys ought to have been well on their guard and tried to get the extension again during the budget process. The DNC and the Biden campaign should’ve been on top of it from the beginning too. They all dropped the ball.
Our chief elections administrator, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, could never be counted on to give lawmakers a heads-up, as he’s spent most of the last year on the campaign trail turning himself into a Forever Trumper in a failed Republican primary bid for U.S. Senate. His official statewide office to oversee the smooth functioning of Ohio’s elections, meanwhile, was “rocked” by “high turnover and low morale.” So Democrats ought to have been extra attentive themselves.
It wasn’t until April 5, 2024 that LaRose’s office wrote to the Ohio Democratic Party to tell them Biden being officially nominated later in August would violate the state’s Aug. 7 deadline, in which case Biden wouldn’t be able to appear on the Ohio ballot.
They had two options, LaRose’s office said: Either hold the convention earlier, or get the Ohio General Assembly to change the law again.
Now remember, the current Ohio General Assembly is seated in unconstitutionally gerrymandered districts that have given Republicans undue supermajorities in both chambers. As a member of the Ohio Redistricting Commission, LaRose participated personally in gerrymandering Ohio’s Statehouse.
As such, our state’s legislature is largely captured by extremists intent on abusing their power and misrepresenting Ohioans. So will Ohio Republican lawmakers agree to simply move the deadline again like before? When there’s nothing in it for them except good and normal governance in promotion of free and fair elections? I wouldn’t count on it.
“This is a Democratic problem,” Republican Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman said, predictably. “If they have a proposed solution, I’m all ears.” He knows what the legislative solution is. He voted for the state budget in 2019 that included the solution for 2020. The only question is whether he’d even let it on the floor of his chamber now, much less support it.
In a letter to LaRose’s office, Ohio attorney Don McTigue offered the idea of a provisional certification of Biden’s nomination by national Democrats, but Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost shot down that proposal, saying a provisional certification wouldn’t be enough and that LaRose doesn’t have the power to change the deadline. It’s true that the normal legal avenue here is for Ohio lawmakers to act. But these are not normal times and this is not a normal legislature.
So that means that national Democrats are likely on their own, which is why I figure what they will have to do is hold the mini-convention and get Biden officially certified before the Aug. 7 deadline.
When the Colorado Supreme Court tried to remove Trump from their ballot over Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, many Republicans submitted briefs to the court pointing out the many ways in which Republican states could retaliate.
That’s been a well-known danger among scholars, especially since January 6: individual states can’t be allowed to use the 14th to have a national party’s presidential candidate removed because it would only lead to tit-for-tat games between red and blue states. And that’s what I’ve said repeatedly since the beginning of that Colorado case:
Even though Trump betrayed his oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States; even though he tried to compel his vice president to overthrow the constitutional order in an unconstitutional ploy to overturn the results of a free and fair election; and even though he set a mob on foot to the U.S. Capitol to disrupt constitutional business, where they put the U.S. chain of succession in grave danger while beating police officers, erecting gallows, and chanting to hang the Vice President of the United States; even though all of that happened, Trump’s eligibility for the ballot under the 14th Amendment can’t be left to the individual states. It has to be left to Congress or the Supreme Court.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed, in part, when they overruled the Colorado Supreme Court. They said only Congress can enforce it. But Ohio Republican politicians seem keen to play a petty game of tit-for-tat anyway.
You know what’s really wild to me about that though? In the 2020 election, 2.6 million Ohioans voted for Biden. LaRose got 2.4 million votes in 2022. Huffman won his last election with 129,218 votes.
And yet they choose to sit on their hands and performatively talk about 2.6 million voters not getting the opportunity to vote for the sitting president who they voted for in 2020? Write it off as the other party’s problem, without caring at all about the actual human voters?
Taunting 2.6 million Ohio voters doesn’t seem like smart politics to me, but we are living in very weird and dysfunctional times.