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Bernie Sanders Sues Ohio Secretary of State to Allow 17-Year Olds to Vote

The presidential candidate claims Jon Husted changed the voting laws to prevent young voters from casting ballots ahead of Ohio's primary.
Photo via RMV/REX/Shutterstock/AP

US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has filed a lawsuit against Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, Jon Husted, claiming that he changed a state law allowing 17-year-olds to vote — in order to prevent them from participating in the presidential primaries.

The Sanders campaign, which has ridden a wave of support from young voters, announced the lawsuit Tuesday afternoon just hours before beating rival Hillary Clinton in a big upset in another important Midwestern state, Michigan. The lawsuit, filed jointly with six 17-year-olds, claims that the changes would affect minorities in particular. In a statement, the campaign characterized Husted's move as an "unconstitutional attempt to block young voters from casting ballots."

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"The secretary of state has decided to disenfranchise people who are 17 but will be 18 by the day of the general election," Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said at a press conference Tuesday afternoon. "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."

Ohio is among more than 20 states that allow 17-year-olds who will turn 18 by the November election to vote in primaries. The lawsuit alleges that Husted unlawfully reinterpreted the rules laid out in a state election manual published in December to bar young voters from casting ballots, in violation of their "constitutional rights of equal protection and due process" under the Fourteenth Amendment. The campaign is seeking an injunction to overturn the changes and resolve the issue before the state holds its primary next Tuesday. The latest polls have Clinton ahead by between 9 and 30 points in Ohio.

Related: The Bernie Sanders Campaign Is Suing the Democratic National Committee

The campaign said in a statement that Husted "is going out of his way to keep" out younger voters, who are "more heavily African American and Latino than older groups of voters," according to US census data.

Husted said he welcomed the lawsuit and denied that there had been any changes made to the rules. He said that 17-year-olds had never been allowed to vote for delegates in the presidential primary and had only ever been able to cast ballots in direct nominations like state Congressional primaries or for the nominee to run for county commission.

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"I am very happy to be sued on this issue because the law is crystal clear," Husted said in a statement. "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," he added. "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."

No they did not - I was the SOS during the last presidential election - nothing has changed — Jon Husted (@JonHusted)March 8, 2016

Related: Sanders Wins Crucial Michigan Election, Trump Continues to Dominate GOP

The Sanders campaign said in the lawsuit that the election of party delegates is merely a formality that designates proxies to send to national party conventions. Voters are in essence casting votes for candidates, so young voters should be allowed to participate, the campaign said.

Weaver said the lawsuit will prove Sanders "is walking the walk, not just talking the talk," when it comes to voting rights. The campaign has relied heavily on the youth vote in key primary states, including Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, where the senator won voters under 30 by roughly 70 percentage points over Clinton. The senator is again relying on youth voter turnout to bolster his delegate count ahead of crucial primaries in Ohio, Illinois, Florida, Missouri, and North Carolina in the next week.

Last December, the campaign filed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee to regain access to a national voter database after it accused the party of "actively attempting to undermine" the Vermont senator's bid for the presidency. The DNC barred the Sanders team from accessing the database after one of Sanders's staff members took advantage of a software glitch to access confidential voter information that belonged to Clinton's campaign.

Follow Liz Fields on Twitter: @lianzifields