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      Ohio governor calls special legislative session to include Biden on election ballot

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      Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has called an emergency legislative session to put Joe Biden’s name on the presidential ballot after what he called an “absurd” threat from the state’s top election officer to remove the president for missing its deadline.For weeks, Ohio’s secretary of state, Frank LaRose, has been at loggerheads with the Democrats over how to put Biden and his vice-president, Kamala Harris, on the ballot given that their official nomination comes after the expiry of the state’s deadline of 90 days before the November election.The Biden-Harris ticket is scheduled to be certified after its official coronation on the final day of the Democratic national convention on 22 August in Chicago, 15 days after Ohio’s 7 August cutoff date.LaRose, also a Republican, warned this week that current rules would force him to exclude Biden’s name from ballot papers, denying voters in the state a full choice of presidential candidates.He wrote to the chair of the Ohio Democratic party, Elizabeth Walters, saying the onus was on the party to change its nominating arrangements because the state legislature had ruled out amending Ohio law to accommodate Biden.In a news conference, DeWine overrode that decision, calling the situation “simply unacceptable”.“Ohio is running out of time to get Joe Biden, the sitting president of the United States, on the ballot this fall,” he said. “Failing to do so is simply not acceptable. This is a ridiculous – this is an absurd situation.”Posting on X, LaRose – who first raised the issue last month – had earlier said he was “duty bound to follow the law as Ohio’s chief elections officer”.“As it stands today, the Democratic Party’s nomination will not be on the Ohio election ballot,” he wrote. “That is not my choice. It’s due to a conflict in the law created by the party, and the party has so far offered no legally acceptable remedy.”The Democrats had earlier suggested resolving the problem by offering a “provisional nomination” of Biden and Harris, a solution LaRose said fell short of the state’s legal standard. Democrats countered that this view was contradicted by the experience of the 2020 election when, they argued, several other states accepted a similar resolution to incompatible deadlines for both parties.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDeWine’s decision potentially saves the Democratic party from filing a lawsuit to force Biden’s name on to the ballot.A similar possible deadlock situation arose in Alabama, but state legislators resolved it by pushing back the certification date, with the governor quickly signing it into law.The imbroglio has come against a backdrop of mistrust between Democrats and Republicans over elections, fuelled by Donald Trump’s relentless peddling of a lie that Biden’s 2020 presidential victory was “stolen”.Ohio was once viewed as a swing state but has recently trended solidly Republican, with Trump triumphing over Biden by eight percentage points four years ago, and beating Hillary Clinton by a similar margin in 2016. More

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      Ohio Elections Official Threatens to Exclude Biden From the Ballot

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      The Ohio General Assembly adjourned on Wednesday without addressing an issue that the state’s top elections official said would prevent President Biden from being placed on the ballot there, escalating a partisan clash that could result in the president not being on the ballot in all 50 states in November.Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state, has said that he plans to exclude Mr. Biden from the ballot because he will be officially nominated after a deadline for certifying presidential nominees on the ballot. This is usually a minor procedural issue, and states have almost always offered a quick solution to ensure that major presidential candidates remain on the ballot.The Biden campaign is considering suing the state in order to ensure Mr. Biden is on the ballot, while also searching for some other way to resolve the issue without moving the date of the nominating convention, according to a person with knowledge of the deliberations.A legal fight could be expensive and arduous. The Supreme Court recently ruled that states could not bar Mr. Trump from running for another term under a constitutional provision, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, that prohibits insurrectionists from holding office. But it took six months of legal wrangling before the court put that issue to bed.Ohio is not considered a swing state — Mr. Trump won there with an eight-point edge in 2020 — but the Biden campaign could be drawn into a monthslong legal battle to ensure that the president is on the ballot in all 50 states.A legislative fix, which would have pushed back the certification deadline to accommodate the late date of the Democratic National Convention, stalled out this month as Republicans in the Ohio Senate tacked on a partisan measure that would ban foreign donations to state ballot initiatives. Mr. LaRose has previously said that passing the ban is the price that Democrats must pay to ensure that Mr. Biden is on the ballot, and that he would otherwise enforce the law as written.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Se está postulando al Senado con una historia de migrante humilde. Te contamos el resto

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      Bernie Moreno, el republicano que se enfrenta al senador Sherrod Brown en Ohio, cuenta una historia de rico venido a menos que volvió a ser rico. Pero la realidad no es tan clara.Se está postulando para el Senado de EE. UU. como un migrante exitoso. Está contactando a los votantes de Ohio con una historia conmovedora, de alguien que superó los obstáculos por sus propios medios, y que solo pudo haberlo hecho en un lugar como Estados Unidos al llegar siendo un niño desde Colombia, arriesgarse con un negocio que estaba en dificultades y luego al convertirlo en un éxito rotundo, volviéndose multimillonario en el proceso.Bajo la bandera del movimiento político populista de Donald Trump, Bernie Moreno, el republicano que está retando al senador Sherrod Brown, se autodenomina humildemente un “tipo que vende automóviles en Cleveland” y relata las modestas circunstancias de su infancia, cuando su familia migrante empezó de cero en Estados Unidos.“Llegamos aquí sin absolutamente nada —llegamos aquí de manera legal– pero llegamos aquí, nueve de nosotros en un apartamento de dos habitaciones”, contó Moreno en 2023, en lo que se convirtió en su discurso característico. Su padre “tuvo que dejarlo todo atrás”, ha dicho, recordando lo que llamó el “estatus de clase media baja” de su familia.Pero hay muchas más cosas que Moreno no dice sobre sus antecedentes, su educación y sus poderosos vínculos actuales con el país que lo vio nacer. Moreno nació en una familia rica y con conexiones políticas en Bogotá, una ciudad que nunca abandonó del todo y donde algunos de sus familiares continúan disfrutando de gran riqueza y estatus.Brown en Dayton, Ohio, en marzoMaddie McGarvey para The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Effort to Keep Biden on the Ballot in Ohio Stalls Out Ahead of Deadline

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      A partisan battle in Ohio has stalled an effort by state lawmakers to ensure that President Biden is on the ballot in the state this November, teeing up what could be an expensive and protracted legal battle ahead of this year’s election.Ohio was one of three states that had warned the Democratic Party that Mr. Biden could be left off the ballot because the Democratic National Convention would take place after certification deadlines for presidential nominees. This is usually a minor procedural issue, and states have almost always offered a quick solution to ensure that major presidential candidates remain on the ballot.Alabama, for example, resolved the issue with little fanfare last week, when the State Legislature overwhelmingly passed a law granting an extension to the deadline accommodating the late date of the Democratic convention, which is scheduled to begin Aug. 19. Election officials in Washington State also signaled that their state would accept a provisional certification of Mr. Biden’s nomination.Legislation similar to the law adopted in Alabama was proposed in the Republican-dominated General Assembly in Ohio but stalled out ahead of a Thursday deadline given by Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state, to change the law. Mr. LaRose has said that the legislature could still resolve the issue with an emergency vote.Republicans in the Ohio Senate advanced a bill on Wednesday that would resolve the issue but attached a rider that would ban foreign money in state ballot initiatives, over the objections of Senate Democrats. The House speaker, Jason Stephens, who is fending off a monthslong effort by some Republicans to oust him and needs support from Democratic lawmakers in the minority to stay in power, did not take up the measure, and the legislature adjourned with no solution in place.Charles Lutvak, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said that Mr. Biden would be on the ballot in all 50 states.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden could be left off general election ballot in Ohio, Republican official warns

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      The Ohio secretary of state has sent a letter to the Ohio Democratic party warning that Joe Biden could be left off the November election ballot in 2024 unless the Democratic National Convention meets earlier or statutory requirements in the state are changed or exempted.According to a letter sent from the Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, a Republican, to Ohio Democratic party chair Liz Walters, the Democratic National Convention scheduled for 19 August where the party officially nominates its candidate for president is past the 7 August deadline to certify presidential candidates on the Ohio ballot.“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,” the legal counsel for Ohio secretary of state Paul Disantis wrote in the letter, according to ABC News. The Ohio Democratic party has said they received the letter and are currently reviewing it. The Biden campaign expressed confidence that the president would be on the ballot for November in Ohio.The Ohio general assembly could pass an exemption waiver before 9 May, or the convention would have to be moved earlier which is unlikely given logistics and scheduling issues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2020, the Republican and Democratic parties held their conventions after Ohio’s deadline and state lawmakers reduced the requirement of 90 days to 60 days before the election to be named on the ballot. More

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      Bernie Moreno says he fled socialism in Colombia for the US in 1971. What does history say?

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      Bernie Moreno, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Ohio who expected to mount a stern challenge to Sherrod Brown, the incumbent leftwing Democrat, says his family fled socialism when they came to the US from Colombia in 1971, when he was four years old.Though such statements formed a central part of Moreno’s campaign message on his way to securing the Republican nomination with support from Donald Trump, they do not withstand historical scrutiny.In an interview in 2020, about his success as a car dealer in Ohio, Moreno described himself as “somebody who moved to this country a long time ago to escape what happens in most South American countries, which is socialism and the absolute prison of those ideas”.In 2021, as Moreno moved into national politics with a first run for a Senate nomination, the Cleveland Plain Dealer said he “says he came to the United States as a child with his mother and siblings to flee socialism in their native Colombia. He believes that same ideology is rising in the United States, and he wants to fight back.”But when Moreno was born, on 14 February 1967, Colombia was nine years into the 16-year period of National Front government, in which conservative and liberal parties alternated being in power as a way to avoid violence between the two factions.Furthermore, the first leftwing Colombian government in modern times is the current one, headed by Gustavo Petro and in power since 2022.Colombia has long been home to leftwing guerrilla groups. As described by the US Congressional Research Service, when Moreno lived there, the country was home to “leftist, Marxist-inspired insurgencies … including the Farc, launched in 1964, and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), which formed the following year”.Such groups, the CRS says, “conducted kidnappings, committed serious human rights violations, and carried out a campaign of terror that aimed to unseat the central government in Bogotá”.Moreno, however, has described an early childhood far removed from such worries.By his own description, his father was secretary of health under Misael Pastrana, a conservative and the last National Front president between 1970 and 1974.“We had a very, very, very, very incredible lifestyle in Colombia,” Moreno said in 2019, at a business event in Cleveland, adding that his mother moved the family to the US – initially against his father’s wishes – because she “didn’t want us to be raised as pampered indoor cats”.The move was “a jump”, Moreno said, “but it was this idea of no fear”.Contacted for comment on Wednesday, Moreno’s communications director, Reagan McCarthy, said: “No where in the [first] quote cited does Bernie say his family came to America because Colombia was a socialist country or that his family was escaping a socialist country at the time.“He very clearly was stating that many South American countries fell to socialism and his parents came to America to ensure their kids would grow up in a free society, out of fear that Colombia would eventually move towards socialism.”As indicated by McCarthy’s reference to “many South American countries [falling] to socialism”, Moreno has also spoken of a fear of being “surrounded” by socialist governments.In 2021, writing in the Toledo Blade, he said: “I was born in South America, surrounded by socialist ideology.”The same year, Moreno told the Landscape, a Cleveland podcast: “I think the [US is] going off [in] a very dangerous direction. It’s a direction I recognise. I grew up surrounded by socialist ideology, whether it’s Venezuela or Cuba [or] now Peru, and I know where this movie ends.”And in a campaign ad, also from 2021, Moreno said: “I came from a country surrounded by the ideology of radicals like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, who promised to give everyone all they needed and solve all their problems, just like [Vermont senator] Bernie Sanders and AOC [New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] are doing today.”Such claims also shake under scrutiny.Cuba has indeed been governed from the left since 1959, when Castro and the Communist party took power after a long fight. Castro was assisted by Guevara, a revolutionary from Argentina – who was killed in October 1967, when Moreno was eight months old.In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Moreno was a young child in Colombia, Venezuela was governed by Rafael Caldera, a Christian Democrat who moved to end conflict with leftwing guerrillas. Ecuador, which also borders Colombia, was also governed by a centrist at that time.Between 1968 and 1975, Peru was led by Juan Velasco Alvarado, a general who seized power in a coup d’état but governed from the political centre. The current president of Peru, Dina Boluarte, is a former member of a Marxist party now governing with the support of rightwingers.Between 1970 and 1973, Chile – more than a thousand miles south of Colombia – was governed by Salvador Allende, its first socialist president. He died on 11 September 1973 as the rightwing Chilean military led by Gen Augusto Pinochet attacked the presidential palace, in a coup backed by the CIA.After coming to the US in 1971, Moreno became a US citizen at 18. In her statement on Wednesday, McCarthy, the Moreno aide, accused the Guardian of failing to celebrate “what could potentially be the first South American-born senator”.The National Republican Senatorial Committee and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Brown declined to comment. More

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      Man Who Threatened to Kill Arizona Official Over Election Gets 2½ Years in Prison

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      Joshua Russell, 46, of Ohio, left threatening messages for Katie Hobbs in 2022, when she was Arizona’s secretary of state and successfully ran for governor.An Ohio man who threatened to kill Katie Hobbs in 2022 when she was secretary of state in Arizona and running to be governor was sentenced Monday to two and a half years in prison, prosecutors announced.The man, Joshua Russell, 46, of Ohio, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Arizona in August to one count of making an interstate threat, according to the Justice Department. He was indicted in December 2022 on charges that he had left several voice messages containing death threats with the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office during the midterm election season, in which Ms. Hobbs was elected governor.Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat, was secretary of state in Arizona and was the state’s top election official when Joe Biden’s 2020 victory there was certified. She was not named in court documents, but a letter filed in court last week on Mr. Russell’s behalf was addressed to her.In the letter, Mr. Russell apologized to Ms. Hobbs and said that he was being treated for anger and drug and alcohol abuse, which he cited as a factor in making the threats.“Social media and news reports (that I didn’t know if they were true or false) became another addiction for me, and only fueled my depression, anxiety and anger,” Mr. Russell wrote.The governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday night, and Mr. Russell’s public defenders could not immediately be reached.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Ohio House Speaker Hit With 10 Additional Felony Charges

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      Larry Householder, already serving a 20-year federal prison sentence, was indicted on additional state felony charges on Monday in connection with a sprawling bribery scheme.A former speaker of the Ohio State House of Representatives, now serving a 20-year federal prison sentence, was indicted on 10 more state felony charges on Monday in connection with a sprawling bribery scheme that handed a $1.3 billion bailout to a major regional energy utility.The charges against the former speaker, Larry Householder, followed an inquiry by the Ohio Organized Crime Commission that also produced indictments last month of two former executives of the Akron-based utility, FirstEnergy Corporation.The two men — Chuck Jones, a former FirstEnergy chief executive officer, and Michael Dowling, a senior vice president — were charged with funneling $4.3 million in bribes to the former chairman of the Ohio Public Utility Commission, Sam Randazzo. They and Mr. Randazzo, who was also indicted, have pleaded not guilty to a total of 27 charges.The FirstEnergy case has been called the largest political scandal in Ohio history. Mr. Householder was convicted of accepting $60 million in bribes in exchange for shepherding into law a mammoth bailout of two unprofitable nuclear power plants owned by a subsidiary of the utility, as well as two coal-fired electric plants and solar energy projects.Mr. Householder, 64, is appealing his racketeering conviction, which took place in federal court last June. Among other things, the new state charges assert that he illegally tapped a campaign account to pay $750,000 in legal fees for his defense and that he failed to disclose loans, debts, legal fees and gifts from lobbyists in ethics statements required of members of the state legislature.The charges — three counts of theft, five counts of record-tampering and single counts of money laundering and telecommunications fraud — could permanently bar Mr. Householder from public office if convicted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More