The early delegate vote

Vox has a good explainer on the controversy over whether the Democratic party is going to hold an early virtual delegate vote to choose the party’s presidential nominee, rather than voting at the convention in the traditional manner.

The story here is that Ohio’s GOP-controlled state government was threatening to leave the Democratic nominee off the ballot, because the Democratic convention was after the state’s August 7 deadline for candidates to be eligible to be put on the November ballot. The Democrats responded by planning a virtual delegate vote for the last week of July and first week of August, as a legal workaround. The Ohio legislature subsequently passed a compromise bill, in which Democrats gave way on certain campaign finance changes, in exchange for moving the ballot deadline up to September.

The status quo is, unless another bill is passed and signed by governor Mike Dewine, the Democratic nominee will be on the Ohio ballot in November, even if no nominee is formally chosen before the convention.

Some Democrats are saying that’s not enough insurance to not go forward with the planned virtual vote (which hasn’t been put into place via the rules committee yet), while others are saying that the former are just using this as an excuse to short-circuit the traditional voting process, when the reason for doing so has disappeared.

This will all have to be resolved within the next week or so, and it’s an interesting subtext to the ongoing battle over whether Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee.