Paul Vernon/AP Photo
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is seen at a Senate campaign event in Columbus, Ohio on March 18, 2024.
Back in the spring, a couple officials in Republican-controlled states made some noise about denying Democrats a spot on their general election ballots because of ballot deadlines. First it was Ohio’s secretary of state, and later Alabama’s. The dirty secret is that this is a perennial problem for the incumbent party when their nominating convention is held in late August, and it always gets fixed.
Indeed, Alabama’s situation got resolved rather quickly. In Ohio, things lingered a bit. Gov. Mike DeWine called a special session, Republicans tried to tie the ballot fix to a change to laws involving so-called “foreign” money in state ballot initiative campaigns (which was largely targeted at one liberal Swiss billionaire), and the whole thing at one point teetered on collapse. As a failsafe measure, the Democratic National Committee moved up its formal nomination process with a “virtual roll call” scheduled for August 7, which would be before Ohio’s deadline.
As often happens in politics, just as the legislation looked to be dead, it was resurrected. Both the nomination fix and the foreign election bill passed, on the same day that the DNC announced the work-around. Gov. DeWine said in a congratulatory statement, “We do not want to leave something so basic as having the sitting President of the United States on the ballot to others when this can—and should—be done legislatively.” And then he signed the bill.
You can read House Bill 2, which was signed on June 2. It is not tied to the sitting president; it says simply: “A major political party shall certify to the Secretary of State in writing the names of its candidates for president and vice-president nominated by its national convention pursuant to section 3505.10 of the Revised Code not later than the sixty-fifth day before the 2024 general election.” That would give the DNC until September 1 to certify those names, well after the convention in Chicago on August 19-22.
Nevertheless, the DNC is still holding the virtual roll call. On June 22 they finalized those plans by a vote of 360-2. The DNC may even move that up to July 21, according to reporting from Bloomberg. That’s 18 days away.
That Bloomberg story says “Democrats had already planned to nominate Biden, 81, before their August convention in order to ensure he appears on the ballot in Ohio, which had an Aug. 7 deadline…” But this is not true, and I don’t understand why it keeps popping up in news stories.
Here’s an entire story from Axios claiming that the party nominee has to be decided before the convention before the Ohio deadline, and that “Ohio lawmakers did not reach a deal to change the state's certification deadline, as they've done in past election cycles.” Yes they did! This is the deal!
Time managed to point out that Ohio did indeed fix this whole thing, “but the DNC has said that the virtual roll call will continue just to be safe.” What!? It’s safe! It’s the law in the state of Ohio!
A request for comment with the DNC was not returned, but I was able to obtain an internal DNC email to committee members about the process, dated June 14 from chair Jaime Harrison. The email admits that Ohio did pass “last-minute legislation adjusting the deadline.” But it adds that “we cannot guarantee that this is the last partisan game we’ll see from bad-faith actors in the Ohio GOP before Election Day.” In particular, the email states, “The legislation goes into effect on September 1, 2024, the day of the new certification deadline, and several weeks after the August 7 deadline. That is a risk we do not want or need to take.”
The enactment date is set in stone. I suppose what the DNC thinks might happen is that, sometime after August 7, Republicans in Ohio will pass a new law nullifying House Bill 2, and removing the Democratic nominee from the ballot as a result. I have no idea how that is supposed to work, or why anyone would think Mike DeWine, who literally called a special session and strong-armed his party to get the fix done, would go along with such a scheme.
According to one DNC member I corresponded with, there was no discussion about the matter among members. And clearly chair Harrison framed it as necessary. Whether it was necessary is another matter.
It’s definitely true that conservative lawyers are going to try to claim that Biden cannot be taken off the ticket at this late stage, but those calls are very hedged, with a lot of “ifs” and “mights” involved. (Courts have generally allowed parties to choose their own nominee, and nobody has been formally selected right now; I don’t see the legal argument.) Anyway that has nothing to do with the Ohio deadline, which is being used as the full rationale for an early roll call.
This obviously was not a big deal prior to last week’s debate, but there’s obviously a possibility of the president choosing not to run for re-election at this point. There’s already a distrust in an apparatus that failed to heed warning signs about Joe Biden’s age, and concern about what the process would possibly look like if he decided to drop out. Moving up the nomination process by a couple weeks or a month for no discernible reason adds to all of that.
