On June 12, the Ohio Senate unanimously passed HB 509, which moves the deadline from August to September for large qualified parties to certify their presidential and vice-presidential nominees. Without this bill, the Ohio deadline, if enforced, would have made it impossible for both major parties to meet the deadline, because their national conventions are so late this year.
As noted before, this bill takes effect immediately, and only applies to the 2012 election, and only affects parties that polled at least 20% of the vote in the last election. Other qualified parties still have an August deadline. However, the practical effects of that discriminatory policy are nil, because all the small qualified parties in Ohio will have held their presidential conventions before August.
The part of the bill dealing with presidential deadlines does not amend the Election Code, probably because the bill only affects the 2012 election. Therefore, the contents of the bill will never be printed in the state’s statutes, and future historians will probably not even notice the bill ever existed.
Having the bill only apply to 2012 seems kind of short-sighted. The trend in recent years has been to push the major party conventions as late as they can go. Ohio might need to pass a similar law four years from now depending on the convention schedule.
How nice of them. So sad that they would have never passed a similar bill to accommodate the needs of so called “minor” parties.
But yes, I can’t wait to see what happens 4 years from now when these two parties push their conventions to October just for the fun of it.
Send copies of the robot party hack FIX law to the archivists in the world NOW – to be looked at for the next zillion years ???
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V
= NO robot party hack caucuses, primaries and conventions.
If this law went to court, wouldn’t it go down on 14 Amendment grounds of equal protection for all political parties?
#4, not unless some plaintiff political party could show that it was injured by the discriminatory treatment.
# 5 How many FACIAL injuries from FACIAL UN-equal ballot access laws have 5 of 9 SCOTUS folks detected since 1968 ???
Which of such cases has been rational whatsoever ??? — or just made up with arbitrary UNEQUAL junk classifications – deadline dates, percentages, etc.
i.e. ANTI-equal protection of the laws.
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