Ohio to hold special legislative session to ensure Biden gets on election ballot
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) announced Thursday that he was calling a special legislative session to ensure President Biden will be on the November election ballot in his state.
“This is simply unacceptable,” DeWine said at a news conference. “Ohio is running out of time to get Joe Biden, the sitting president of the United States, on the ballot this fall. Failing to do so is simply not acceptable. This is a ridiculous — this is an absurd — situation.”
The special session is set to start Tuesday.
Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, first warned Democrats in early April that Biden was at risk of missing the ballot because the Democratic National Convention, scheduled for Aug. 19-22, falls after the state’s certification deadline of Aug. 7.
A similar issue also came up in Alabama but with little drama as state lawmakers passed a bill to move the deadline later and Gov. Kay Ivey (R) quickly signed it into law.
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State lawmakers in Ohio had also hoped to fix the problem legislatively — as they have done in prior elections — but House leaders said this week that the effort was at an impasse.
Biden’s reelection campaign has expressed confidence that he will be on the ballot in all 50 states.
Democrats initially floated “provisional” ballot certification as a potential solution, noting that GOP-led states have previously made such accommodations for presidential candidates from their own party. But LaRose and the Alabama secretary of state, Wes Allen, rejected that, leaving state legislators to sort out the issue.
LaRose has taken a hard line in Ohio, including in a letter that he sent to the Ohio Democratic Party chair, Elizabeth Walters, on Tuesday.
“Unless your party plans to comply with the statutory deadline, I am duty-bound to instruct boards of elections to begin preparing ballots that do not include the Democratic Party’s nominees for president and vice president of the United States,” LaRose wrote.
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LaRose said Thursday on X that he applauded DeWine’s “decisive leadership in calling a special session to resolve this issue for the voters of our state.”
DeWine said the special session will also include legislation to “prohibit campaign spending by foreign nationals” — a proposal that the ballot certification issue has become mixed up with in the GOP-led General Assembly. After DeWine’s announcement, Walters said in a statement that Ohio Republicans “must put politics aside and pass a clean bill to put Joe Biden on the ballot.”
LaRose initially said May 9 was the deadline for lawmakers to pass a fix. DeWine said Thursday he spoke to LaRose earlier in the day and came away understanding that Wednesday is the last possible day for lawmakers to approve a remedy.
“My understanding is we are literally up against the wall here, that if we would go beyond Wednesday of next week, then when you do the math, you have some very, very serious, serious problems,” DeWine said.
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