Ohio Looks At Texas Election Chaos, Says 'Mmm Mmm, I Want Me Some Of That'
If there's one thing we've learned from paying attention to the primary races this year, it's that primary races in this country are NUTS. Every state has its own crazy variation on the process. In some states, you can pick which party's primary to vote in on election day; in others, you can only vote in the primary for the party you're registered in. In some states, there's a second round of primary voting if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote; in others, whoever comes in first wins, even if they just get a plurality. (Georgia falls into the former camp in both cases, which helped give our dear Cynthia a hard time.)
In Ohio, apparently, if the person who wins the primary then withdraws from the race, they haveanotherprimary. Presumably they JUST KEEP DOING IT until somebody agrees to actually run in the general election. So when Bob Ney announced after winning the Republican primary that he isn't running for re-election after all (his familyisn't going to spend time with itself), that set up a second Republican primary. Joy Padgett, a state Senator, is the leading candidate, and she has Ney and John Boehner's backing; but she may not be eligible to run, since she was the lieutenant gubernatorial candidate on a ticket that lost in the Republican primary in May, and a recently passed Ohio law says that you can't run in multiple primaries in the same year. Got that?
It's all a big mess, obviously, and it's going to get messier because the law in question -- known as the "sore loser law" -- was itself kind of a boo-boo.
One official said the legal controversy arose in part because the law as drafted differed from what lawmakers had said they intended -- which was to prevent a primary loser from later filing as a candidate in the same race.
Candidate for Rep Ney's Seat May Be Ineligible [AP via LAT]