Ohio lawsuit shows Clinton is already looking at battleground states

Lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Ohio Democratic Party have filed suit over Ohio’s early voting laws, suggesting that Clinton is already looking downfield to what will be a key battleground state in the 2016 general election.
The lawsuit, filed late Friday in Columbus, alleges that Republican lawmakers in Ohio have specifically targeted key Democratic constituencies — young people, Latinos and African-Americans — by eliminating the so-called “Golden Week” during which voters could register and vote on the same day.
The lawsuit does not mention Clinton, and she is not a plaintiff. The plaintiffs include the Ohio Organizing Collaborative and three Ohio voters — an Ohio State University student with a California driver’s license, a Democratic poll worker from suburban Cincinnati and an African-American minister from Akron.
The lawyers are more interesting. They include Don McTigue, a lawyer for the Ohio Democratic Party, and Marc Elias, who’s the general counsel for Hillary for America. Elias is not licensed to practice law in Ohio and is seeking permission from the court to represent the plaintiffs in the case.
The Clinton campaign said it was aware of the lawsuit, but it wasn’t filed on behalf of the campaign. “However, the campaign shares the concern about undue burdens being placed on the right to vote in states across the country, including Ohio,” said Hillary for America Press Secretary Brian Fallon.
But Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a defendant in the suit, called the plaintiff’s lawyers “politically motivated, legal lap dogs” who were “simply intending to interject chaos into Ohio’s nationally recognized voting system.” Husted notes that Ohio recently settled a federal lawsuit over many of the same issues, and that Ohio still has more liberal early voting laws than New York, where Clinton lives.
Elias said the lawsuit was brought on behalf of the named plaintiffs, and is just one of many lawsuits his Washington law firm, Perkins Coie, has brought to defend the right to vote. “It is unfortunate that Secretary Husted chose to respond with a political attack rather than working to remedy the problems identified in our suit,”