Earlier this month, we looked at the situation in Alabama where Joe Biden had been in danger of not appearing on the ballot in November because of some Democratic scheduling snafus. Alabama Republicans generously resolved the matter by granting the Democrats an exemption. Biden is facing the same situation in Ohio, caused by the same scheduling issues. However, he's not faring quite as well there, or at least not yet. The Ohio GOP has thus far not seemed to be in such a generous mood and a measure intended to resolve the issue and allow Biden to be on the ballot anyway passed in the state Senate, but stalled in the House without a vote. The trouble is that today is the deadline for putting such a change through and having it take effect in time for the convention. (NBC News)

An effort to ensure that President Joe Biden is on Ohio’s general election ballot stalled Wednesday in the Legislature, raising the likelihood of legal action to resolve the issue.

It's the latest twist in what has usually been a straightforward move to fix conflicts between late conventions and state election laws in the past.

This time, with their own convention scheduled for July, Republicans appear less inclined to help Democrats without something in return.

Oddly, the House had already passed a bill that would have granted the Democrats an extension and it had support from the GOP. But rather than voting on that measure, the Senate introduced its own bill that would do the same thing but also included a provision to ban foreign contributions to state ballot measure campaigns. Since the two bills don't match, they would need to be reconciled. Alternatively, the House GOP could abandon their own bill and take up a vote on the Senate version. There was no announcement as to whether such a vote would take place today.

If the Ohio legislature can't get this mess cleaned up today, they would then have to seek a second extraordinary exception allowing the new voting law to take effect sooner than it normally would under standard state laws. Those are a lot of hoops to ask the GOP to jump through just to put Joe Biden on the ballot. Given Ohio's critical position as a swing state that both candidates need to carry, these developments become even more interesting. Trump won Ohio in 2020 by eight points, roughly the same margin of victory he enjoyed over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But now it's 2024 and the world has been turned upside down. The latest poll showed Trump leading Biden by twelve in the Buckeye State, but that might be meaningless six months from now.

Since it's now apparently at least in the realm of possibility, what would it mean if Joe Biden failed to make it onto the ballot in Ohio this November? I assume all of his supporters would need to write his name in. Whether that would produce some sort of negative impact on Biden's numbers is unknown because we've never had a sitting president show up as a write-in candidate before. Also, as more and more locations adopt digital scanners and other electronic voting machines, submitting a write-in candidate's name can become more complicated. It could potentially slow down the count in Ohio on election night if nothing else.

Personally, I would prefer to see the Ohio GOP get in gear and just pass one of the bills before the deadline, even though I'm not a resident there and don't really have a say in the matter. I very much want Joe Biden to be replaced in the upcoming election. In fact, I think it's critical to the future of the nation that this happens. But if Donald Trump is to be victorious, he should win the race fair and square, not through any sort of ballot trickery. We don't need another round of fights over election integrity or the accuracy of the vote count. We need to get down to work fixing all of the damage Biden and the Democrats have inflicted since the start of 2021.