Unlike last year, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted is disallowing 17-year-olds who will be 18 at the time of the general election in November to vote in Ohio presidential primaries. At best, the timing one week before the elections seems unusual, so I did some looking. I once again had my Universal Theory of Bullshit confirmed in spectacular fashion.
The theory—a theory which has withstood every single challenge for many years—is that no matter how complex someone is trying to make something sound, all bullshit exists on the lowest levels of logic and reason. Corollary: the size of the pile of bullshit is directly proportional to the degree of irony contained therein.
The Ohio Secretary of State’s argument goes something like this: 17-year-olds are permitted by law to vote to “nominate” someone for a general election in which they will be eligible to vote to “elect” them when they are 18. In the Ohio presidential primaries, you are voting to “elect” a delegate, who will then “nominate” the candidate, not “nominating” a candidate. In his own words:
Jon Husted: “If you are going to be 18 by the November election, you can vote, just not on every issue.
That means 17-year-olds can vote in the primary, but only on the nomination of candidates to the general election ballot. They are not permitted to elect candidates, which is what voters are doing in a primary when they elect delegates to represent them at their political party's national convention, or vote on issues like school, police and fire levies."
Therefore, according to Husted, the law should be interpreted as follows for 17-year-olds:
Can Participate in Election Process:
National Senator
State Senator
National Representative
State Representative
Governor of Ohio
Every other official in the state and federal government I haven’t mentioned.
Cannot Participate in Election Process:
School levy
President of the United States of America
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This seemed...odd.
The first place I checked was the Ohio statutes. Here’s black letter law:
3503.011 Qualifications of electors for primary elections.
At a primary election every qualified elector who is or will be on the day of the next general election eighteen or more years of age, and who is a member of or is affiliated with the political party whose primary election ballot he desires to vote, shall be entitled to vote such ballot at the primary election. - 1981
Of note is that the word “elect” doesn't actually appear in that law. The Ohio Secretary of State would like (love, actually) to treat the words "election" and "elect" like a pancake that can be flipped whenever it suits his fancy. Furthermore, he “welcome[s] this lawsuit and I am very happy to be sued on this issue because the law is crystal clear. We are following the same rules Ohio has operated under in past primaries, under both Democrat and Republican administrations. There is nothing new here.”
I think he is full of shit. The reason I think that is because of the following:
The law was passed in 1981 after the 1980 election of Reagan. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted turned seventeen in the state of Ohio on August 25th, 1984, just in time to be eligible to vote in the very first presidential primary this law would have applied to. However, he would have us believe that the practice of 17-year-olds voting in presidential primaries is a completely new concept to him and has never once taken place, despite it occurring in—and only in— quite literally every single presidential primary of his voting life, and despite having been appointed Ohio Secretary of State in 2011 just in time for the last presidential election, where he watched it happen before his very eyes.
I can’t possibly imagine how a Kasich administration member would suddenly notice this legal dissonance concerning people who will likely vote against his boss a week before the primary, but it may be the same logic as making Ohio a winner-take-all state instead of proportional for the 2016 election in the state said boss is most likely to win.
To ice the argument on purely technical grounds, the delegate you are supposedly electing isn’t even a single delegate. There are, say, ten delegates from a district and you’re voting to have the DNC or RNC select a random representative to actually cast the vote. So no, you’re not directly electing anybody. You’re voting to empower one candidate’s cronies to select a delegate from that pool to cast a vote. In other words, you are “choose[ing] (someone or something) as a candidate for receiving an honor or award”
That’s Merriam–Webster’s definition of “nominate”, by the way.
The final irony is that Bernie Sanders is suing only because his campaign is collateral damage from Jon Husted's attempt to disenfranchise the supporters of his boss's biggest rival, Donald Trump—a man who has filed a parade of frivolous lawsuits for political gain, and yet abstained from the one single legal battle where he would actually have a good reason to sue.