Democratic Party leaders said Tuesday they will nominate President Biden for a second term via a virtual roll call of delegates to the party’s national convention, circumventing a glitch in Ohio law that threatened to keep Mr. Biden in office away from the November ballot. State.
Ohio law requires all candidates to be legally certified by August 7, but Mr. Biden was not expected to be officially nominated until after the Democratic National Convention began on August 19. The virtual call will be completed by the Ohio deadline.
The party acted as the Ohio Legislature met in special session for the first time in two decades with the goal of passing legislation that would have resolved the voting problem at the state level. Lawmakers had easily dealt with identical issues involving presidential candidates in 2012 and 2016, but deep divisions among Republicans had blocked any action for weeks.
A frustrated Gov. Mike DeWine, also a Republican, called lawmakers into the special session last week, calling their failure to end the legislative gridlock “ridiculous” and “absurd.”
Just last week, Ohio House Speaker Rep. Jason Stephens bluntly declared his inability to find a quick solution to Mr. Biden’s voting problem.
“There’s just no desire to do this on the part of the Legislature,” he told reporters Wednesday. “It’s a hyperpolitical environment this time of year. And there are Republicans who just didn’t want to vote.”
Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison released a statement Tuesday denouncing Republican lawmakers for their inaction. “Joe Biden will be on the ballot in Ohio and all 50 states, and Ohio Republicans agree,” he said. “But when the time came to act, they failed to act every time, so the Democrats will land this plane on our own.”
Early calling is not a new solution. Democrats also held a remote vote on Mr. Biden’s nomination in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
That Ohio’s special session was necessary exposed both the dysfunction and the depth of partisan rancor within the ruling party, which holds supermajorities in both chambers of the Legislature.
Faced with similar discrepancies in 2012 and 2020, the Ohio Legislature approved one-time exceptions to the Aug. 7 deadline to accommodate political party convention calendars. Alabama lawmakers faced an identical technical problem this year and unanimously adopted their own solution on May 3.
But Ohio Republicans left the state Capitol earlier this month without taking action on the ballot issue, even though the state’s Republican Secretary of State, Frank LaRose, warned of the problem on April 5.
Deep divisions between radical and moderate Republicans in the Ohio House of Representatives, as well as a political rivalry between Republicans in the House and Senate, have roiled the Legislature for more than a year.
Parliament approved only 16 bills during its 2023 session, the Cleveland Plain dealer reported in January, including measures making November 19 James A. Garfield Day, in honor of the 20th Ohio-born president, and making July Sarcoma Awareness Month. That total is the lowest since at least the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s, the newspaper said.
