Ohio’s Secretary of State says Biden may not be on the November ballot

On Friday, Ohio’s Secretary of State sent some very bad news to the Ohio Democratic Party: The deadline for certifying a presidential candidate to appear on Ohio’s ballot is August 7. However, the DNC convention isn’t being held until August 19. Until then, despite his current status as the Democrat frontrunner, Biden isn’t technically the Democrat party candidate. This is a huge egg-on-the-face moment for the DNC. While the situation can be remedied, that it happened reflects the anti-meritocracy that the left has become.

Democrats have been holding nominating conventions since 1832. In the ensuing 192 years, late August/early September conventions have occurred, although they’ve been rare.

In the early days, conventions were held in May, although the 1864 convention was held on the last three days of August. After the Civil War, June or July became the norm, and the Democrats didn’t hold another “end of August” convention until one hundred years later, in 1964, something they repeated in 1968. The next “end of August” convention was in 1996. Obama was nominated on August 28, 2008, and again on September 6, 2012. In 2020, Joe Biden got the nomination on August 20.

This year, though, the August 19 convention is going to be a problem. It turns out that, per current rules governing ballots in Ohio, the Secretary of State must have the names of certified candidates by August 7:

There could be potential general election ballot access concerns for President Joe Biden in Ohio, the state’s Secretary of State’s office said in a letter to Ohio Democratic Chair Liz Walters on Friday.

In the letter, obtained by ABC News, legal counsel for Secretary of State Frank LaRose sought clarification for “an apparent conflict in Ohio law” between the Democratic National Committee’s nominating process and the deadline by which the party’s presidential nominee must be certified to the Secretary of State’s office.

The Democratic National Convention is scheduled to convene on Aug. 19, which will take place more than a week after the Aug. 7 deadline to certify a presidential candidate in Ohio, the office flagged according to state code, which would create a problem for Biden’s eligibility.

Of course, all is not lost. In the same letter, we learn that there are two ways that the Democrats can remedy the situation: immediate legislation or changing the convention date:

“I am left to conclude that the Democratic National Committee must either move up its nominating convention or the Ohio General Assembly must act by May 9, 2024 (90 days prior to a new law’s effective date) to create an exception to this statutory requirement,” legal counsel Paul Disantis wrote in the letter, requesting a quick response on a solution to become compliant with state law.

There’s not a snowball’s chance in H-E-double-toothpicks that Ohio will act to keep Biden off the ballot. Since the logistics and expense of changing the convention are almost inconceivable, the legislature will be sure to act, and that’s despite it being majority Republican.

Or at least, I assume it will act. Republicans generally don’t believe in disenfranchising actual, living people who are legally entitled to vote. That’s a Democrat thing and has been since the days of Jim Crow and Boss Tweed.

So, on the one hand, this is a big, although amusing, Nothing Burger. On the other hand, it’s a sign of the disarray within the Democrat party.

It is no longer a party that’s made up of competent people. Between the fossils at the top (Biden, Pelosi, Nadler, etc.), the recent college graduate radicals at the bottom, and the anti-merit philosophy permeating every aspect of the left, no one in the party bothered to pay attention to individual state requirements for getting on the ballot. In other words, the party reflects the way Biden governs: incompetent at every level.

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