Governor of Ohio Mike DeWine has signed a measure to ensure President Joe Biden will appear on the state ballot in November.
DeWine, a Republican, signed the measure — which relaxes the deadline for state candidate filings — on Sunday along with a related bill that would impose a ban on out-of-state nationals contributing to state ballot campaigns. Both will come into effect on August 31.
The Republican-dominated Legislature had approved the two measures during a rare special session last week. The contribution ban was demanded by the Senate, which approved the measures on Friday, a day after the House adopted them.
The contribution ban also expanded the definition of “foreign nationals” to include lawful permanent residents of the U.S., also known as green card holders. The provision was added to the House bill, with proponents saying it would close “a glaring loophole in the bill,” but several lawmakers questioned whether this would ultimately lead the courts to strike down the entire measure as unconstitutional would reject.
The special session was ostensibly called by DeWine to signal that Ohio’s deadline for holding the November vote falls on August 7, about two weeks before the Democratic president will be formally nominated at the party’s August 19-22 convention. Chicago.
But when the Senate — and then DeWine’s proclamation calling lawmakers back to Columbus — tied the issue to the alien ban, the Democratic National Committee acted to neutralize the need for a vote in Ohio. Along with the Biden campaign, it announced this week that it would resolve Biden’s voting deadline problem in Ohio itself by holding a virtual roll call vote to nominate him. This solution will be voted on in committee on Tuesday.
The Democratic National Committee has said the planned virtual roll call is still going ahead.
On Thursday, Democrats in the Ohio House had accused the Republican supermajorities in both chambers of exploiting the Biden conundrum to pass an unrelated bill that undermines direct democracy in Ohio, where voters are siding with prevailing positions the GOP leaders chose by wide margins on three separate ballot measures. last year. That included protecting access to abortion in the state constitution, rolling back a proposal to make it harder to pass such constitutional changes in the future, and legalizing recreational marijuana.
Political committees involved in the first two attempts took money from entities that had received donations from Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss over the past decade, although any direct path from him to the Ohio campaigns is untraceable under the campaign finance laws not addressed in House legislation. Wyss lives in Wyoming.
The move to ban contributions has the potential to impact get-out-the-vote campaigns heading into Ohio’s Nov. 5 ballot. These include measures proposing changes to Ohio’s redistricting law, raising the minimum wage to $15, granting qualified immunity to police and protecting certain voting rights.
