Ohio House pairs fix assuring President Biden is on fall ballot with foreign nationals giving ban

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A temporary fix allowing President Joe Biden to appear on this fall’s ballot cleared the Ohio House during a rare special session Thursday, along with a ban on foreign nationals contributing to state ballot campaigns that representatives said was demanded in exchange by the Ohio Senate.

The Senate was expected to take up both bills on Friday — though fractured relations between the chambers means their successful passage was not guaranteed.

The special session was ostensibly called to address the fact that Ohio’s deadline for making the November ballot falls on Aug. 7, about two weeks before the Democratic president was set to be formally nominated at the party’s Aug. 19-22 convention in Chicago. Democrats’ efforts to qualify Biden provisionally were rejected by Ohio’s attorney general.

The Democratic National Committee had moved to neutralize the need for any vote in Ohio earlier in the week, when it announced it would solve Biden’s problem with Ohio’s ballot deadline itself by holding a virtual roll call vote to nominate him. A committee vote on that work-around is set for Tuesday.

On Thursday, Democrats in the Ohio House accused Republican supermajorities in both chambers of exploiting the Biden conundrum to undermine direct democracy in Ohio, where voters sided against GOP leaders’ prevailing positions by wide margins on three separate ballot measures last year. That included protecting abortion access in the state Constitution, turning back a proposal to make it harder to pass such constitutional amendments in the future, and legalizing recreational marijuana.

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