Ohio Supreme Court Candidates Need Your Vote

I just opened the latest email to hit my box, and it's from Judge Bill O'Neill of Geauga County, who is running for the third time for the state Supreme Court.

He's just about the only candidate in the country not bombarding followers with requests for money because his campaign slogan is "Money and judges don't mix." (Would that that were true. In real life, most of our state Supreme Court has been purchased by special interests). He's looking for volunteers to pass out literature.

To get a free pack of literature — from 100 to 2,500 — sent to you free to pass out to your friends, in your neighborhood, or at your event, go here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?fromEmail=true&formkey=dGRi...

But here's the most important thing you need to do: tell everyone you know to write the names of ALL three Democratic Supreme Court candidates on a piece of paper or their arm (or take the Dem sample ballot with them) and vote for ALL of them — O'Neill, Mike Skindell and Yvette McGee Brown. And emphasize the importance of voting ALL THE WAY down the ballot. Democrats are way worse at doing this than Republicans, which is one reason they win these slots. We cannot leave these races unvoted.

Currently the state Supreme Court includes six Republicans and one Democrat — Brown, who was appointed by Governor Ted Strickland. If she loses, we'll be back to having seven Republicans on the court as we were before her appointment. That's just not acceptable.

As I've said before, I wish the Ohio Democratic Party was more aggressive and coordinated about running their Supreme Court candidates as a slate. I'm STILL going to events and hearing Brown being the only candidate mentioned. THAT is not acceptable either. Remember that judicial candidates do not have a party identification by their names, a silly charade given that they run in partisan primaries. It puts the burden on the vote to know who's who.

O'Neill has been shown to lead his opponent Robert Cupp in a couple of Columbus Dispatch polls, while Skindell is trailing his opponent, Terrence O'Donnell. It's hard not to believe this is a result of the so-called "name game," where an Irish name trumps almost everything else.

The Dispatch polls have also shown that most voters have no clue who the candidates are or who they support, typical in these races, and the reason there's ballot falloff and people vote for familiar-sounding names. And it's why we have to get out and let everyone we run into know who our candidates are.