Like last year, I contributed to The New Political’s voters guide. This year I wrote blurbs about Ohio’s 30th District State Senate candidates Lou Gentile and Frank Hoagland, Ohio House of Representatives candidates Sarah Grace and Jay Edwards, and several unopposed candidates running for offices in Athens County and Athens proper. The full voters’ guide can be viewed here.
voting
Tony Goldwyn of “Scandal” makes the case for a President Hillary Clinton
multimedia, The New PoliticalRead the original story here.
Actor Tony Goldwyn visited Athens on Sunday afternoon to express his support for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Goldwyn, who plays President Fitzgerald Grant on ABC’s “Scandal,” addressed a small group of local political activists in the driveway of a Graham Drive home, encouraging them to continue getting people to vote early and sharing his personal reasons for supporting Clinton.
Hillary Clinton opens campaign office in Athens
The New PoliticalRead the original story here.
Data: Ohio House of Representatives 2015
DataI recently compiled a spreadsheet of every vote taken by the Ohio House of Representatives in 2015. It was extremely tedious and time-consuming, so hopefully someone else out there who needs this information can benefit from downloading my data set here rather than having to sort through all those session journals themselves.
Online voter registration could soon come to Ohio
The New PoliticalRead the original story here.
Ohio voters could be registering online before the 2016 election, if one Ohio Senate bill becomes law.
Senate Bill 63 deals primarily with creating a system for online voter registration and, if passed, would make Ohio the 29th state to implement such a system. Registration would involve the Bureau of Motor Vehicles database verifying personal information, allowing anyone with an Ohio driver’s license or state ID to register remotely.
“It’s convenient for voters, and what that means is that it can help them take that first step of participating in our democracy,” said Sen. Frank LaRose, R-Copley, the bill’s primary sponsor. “Obviously, before you vote, you have to register, and every year we’ve got a new group of people that are turning 18 and should be registering to vote, and yet they don’t register until later in life.”
The New Political: Voters’ Guide 2015
multimedia, The New PoliticalThe New Political has put together a voters’ guide for the November 2015 city and state elections. As state editor, I contributed the blurbs for state Issues 1, 2 and 3. See the full guide here.
Kasich vetoes voting restrictions
The New PoliticalRead the original story here.
After receiving a letter from all members of the Senate Democratic Caucus encouraging him to do so, Gov. John Kasich used his line-item veto last week on a controversial amendment to the state transportation budget that would have affected new and temporary Ohio residents’ voting rights.
This section of House Bill 53 included restrictions that would have required people wishing to drive in Ohio to register for an Ohio driver’s license within 30 days of registering to vote.
While the language directly connected to voting has been removed, the provisions that require drivers to obtain an Ohio license within 30 days of establishing residency in other ways were left in the transportation bill.
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