Ballot access is ordinarily a mundane procedural aspect of a presidential election. Its greatest significance usually centers on whether third-party candidates can clear various hurdles to become viable voting options in a state. The small number of votes they win may not seem like a lot. But in close elections, a few thousand votes well distributed here or there to Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, or — this year — RFK Jr. can undo a major-party presidential campaign.
But ballot access has assumed an unusual and direct importance this year for major-party candidates. Last December, the Colorado supreme court attempted to remove Donald Trump from the Republican-primary ballot in the state. A few days later, the Maine secretary of state unilaterally tried the same in that state. A March ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court ended both efforts. In the intervening period, some state-level Republican officials wondered about the possibility of removing Biden from the ballot in their states in retaliation.
Now it is indeed Joe Biden’s turn to worry about ballot appearance in a red state: Ohio. But state law, not partisan spite, threatens him: specifically, a provision that a presidential candidate be officially certified as his party’s nominee 90 days before the general election. The Democratic National Convention, beginning August 19, is insufficiently distant from the November 5 general election to qualify.
The Columbus Dispatch explains that Democrats can avoid this fate if they move up their convention, or if the Ohio general assembly passes a one-time waiver allowing an exception (as it did for both parties in 2020). The Biden campaign says that it is “monitoring the situation in Ohio” (aren’t we all) and fully expects Biden to be on all states’ ballots. He almost certainly will be. Whether or not this oversight is another indicator of Biden’s flawed campaign, it is certainly a testament to how, in life as in politics, the little things matter.