Bernie Sanders’s campaign sued Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted for allegedly changing a law to prevent 17-year-olds from voting in the state’s primary election.
The lawsuit occurred this Tuesday. That afternoon, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver spoke to reporters about the allegations.
“The secretary of state has decided to disenfranchise people who are 17 but will be 18 by the day of the general election,” he said. “Those people have been allowed to vote under the law of Ohio, but the secretary of state of the state of Ohio has decided to disenfranchise those people to forbid them from voting in the primary that is coming up on March 15.”
Sanders himself called the law unconstitutional, saying in a statement that the group most affected by the changing law would be minorities.
“It is an outrage that the secretary of state in Ohio is going out of his way to keep young people — significantly African-American young people, Latino young people — from participating,” he said.
Sanders’s campaign says Husted altered a December election manual and distributed pamphlets about the change. The pamphlets, however, only stated that 17-year-olds are prohibited from voting on referendums and elections of state party members; there was nothing written about presidential primaries.
Husted said that the law has not been changed after all.
“I welcome this lawsuit and I am very happy to be sued on this issue because the law is crystal clear,” he said. “We are following the same rules Ohio has operated under in past primaries, under both Democrat and Republican administrations. There is nothing new here. 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.”
Nonetheless, the campaign insists that votes in the primary aim to elect presidential candidates, not party delegates, and therefore 17-year-olds should be able to vote.
Many consider the Ohio primary to be one of the most important for both parties.
Featured image by AFGE, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
