Ohio's top election official is demanding that Democrats stop using his state as an excuse to justify their expedited nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris for president at a virtual meeting next month.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose sent a letter to DNC Chairman Jamie Harris on Thursday calling out party officials for deceptively claiming the Buckeye State's ballot access deadline requires them to nominate a presidential candidate before the party convention in Chicago on Aug. 19-22.
"I’ve seen numerous media reports and interviews within the past week in which you repeatedly cite Ohio’s August 7 ballot access deadline as justification for your committee’s intent to conduct a ‘virtual nominating convention,’" LaRose wrote to Harrison. "As you know, the Ohio General Assembly made an exception to the ballot access deadline for the 2024 presidential election, passing legislation signed by the governor that temporarily extends it to September 1, 2024."
The Democratic National Committee announced Wednesday it will hold a virtual roll call vote on the party's presidential and vice presidential nominees weeks before the convention, purportedly because of a ballot-access conflict in Ohio. Harrison and other Democratic officials have insisted the early vote is necessary because of an Aug. 7 deadline under Ohio state law.
"Since May, MAGA Republicans in Ohio have played games with our democracy and threatened to keep Democrats off the general election ballot. Just this week, after President Biden withdrew from the race, Republicans like Speaker Mike Johnson threatened litigation to challenge the Democratic nominee’s place on the ballot and disenfranchise voters," a DNC spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
"The Democratic Party is undertaking an open, fair, and democratic process to select our nominee, ensure we meet all legal requirements – not just in Ohio, and move forward as a united Democratic Party with a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump in November," the spokesperson added.
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Under DNC rules, candidates have until July 27 to declare their candidacies with the convention and until July 30 to show they've met the qualifications for nomination. The earliest delegates can begin voting electronically will be Aug. 1, assuming Harris is the only candidate to declare and meet the required qualifications and delegate support threshold.
Although unlikely, if more than one candidate declares and meets those requirements, a period of up to five days will be allowed for each candidate to make the case for nomination to the delegates before voting can begin.
Harris announced she'd locked up the nomination within 36 hours of Biden's exit from the race, noting she'd won commitments of backing from a majority of the nearly 4,000 delegates.
"I am proud to have earned the support needed to become our party’s nominee," she wrote in a social media post just after midnight early Tuesday morning.
Contrary to what Democrats are saying, LaRose argued there is nothing in Ohio state law that would keep the eventual Democratic presidential candidate off the ballot so long as a candidate is nominated before Sept. 1.
"As the state’s chief elections officer, I’ve confirmed with our state’s attorney general that Ohio law does not require the DNC to conduct a ‘virtual roll call’ prior to your scheduled August convention dates," LaRose wrote.
"I’m confident that your attorneys are well-aware of this fact, and I suspect your current rhetorical posturing is part of a plan to replace the incumbent president without a contested convention or any kind of democratic process. It’s clever, if not completely antithetical to your party’s relentless finger wagging about threats to democracy, but I ask that you stop using Ohio to justify your course of action."
LaRose concluded his letter with an assurance that so long as the Democrats nominate candidates for president and vice president before Sept. 1, they will appear on the Ohio ballot.
Fox News Digital's Paul Steinhauser and Brandon Gillespie contributed to this report.
