Republican Official Says He's Going To Ban Joe Biden From The Ohio Ballot This Year

The Republican Secretary of State of Ohio, Frank LaRose, says that he is basically left with no other choice than to remove President Biden from the state's ballots for this year's election. LaRose claims that the Democratic Convention falls AFTER a deadline for officially-nominated candidates to make it on the ballot, and therefore he can't be on it this year. For a state as crucial as Ohio, this could be devastating for the President - not to mention that things like this happen all the time and are never enforced. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Republicans across the country have been fantasizing about kicking President Biden off of their state ballots ever since we had several states try and ultimately fail, thanks to the conservative Supreme Court, to kick Donald Trump off of their ballots. But Frank LaRose, the Republican Secretary of State from Ohio, has come up with a very clever way to kick President Biden off the Ohio ballot this year and he says, by God, he's gonna do it. Here's what's happening. Actually, let me just read this to you from the New York Times. 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. Now, the problem, of course, with that, if Biden wants to move the date of the convention to meet the criteria to be on the ballot, um, that's gonna cause a whole host of headaches, you know, legal logistics, all that, money. Horrible idea just to get back on the Ohio ballot. Now, he could challenge it, take it to the Supreme Court, but we're less than six months away from the election, and it took them six months to determine whether or not Donald Trump could stay on the ballot. So that's not even a viable option because they could just kick it down the road and decide it after the presidential election, which they probably would do.

But it's not like this hasn't happened before. As the New York Times points out, Ohio, an increasingly Republican state passed temporary extensions to its certification deadline for President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012, and for President Donald J. Trump in 2020. So these same a-holes that say, oh no, Biden, you missed the deadline. Well, so did Trump, but you extended it for him. Now, technically, to be fair, right, let's make sure we get everything accurate here, the Republicans in Ohio did actually have a piece of legislation to extend the deadline so President Biden didn't miss it, and it was easily gonna pass until Republicans attached an amendment to that piece of legislation that had nothing to do with extending the deadline. And in fact, actually banned foreign money from being used to influence ballot initiatives. Like basically, you couldn't have a foreign entity come in and fund measures related to ballot initiatives, which honestly, the Democrats in Ohio don't want that. And I don't understand that.

Like, that actually, that's a good idea. Like let's not have any foreign money influencing any kind of election anywhere in the United States, right? That should be a no brainer. But because they put that amendment on there, the Democrats wouldn't vote for it and so it stalled out. Now, it could still pass. Again, I have no knowledge and no rational reason in my head why that wouldn't just pass, right? Like, no, no, no, we want foreign money. That's horrible. I don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican.