County Dems welcome candidates at annual picnic
Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley visited Auglaize County for the first time over the weekend, speaking at the annual Auglaize-mercer
Democratic Picnic.
Cranley publicly
stated his intent to run for
Ohio governor in the 2022 Ohio gubernatorial election
as current Gov. Mike
Dewine’s current term will be up.
Cranley, a native of Cincinnati, graduated from Harvard Law School and Harvard Divinity School and has been mayor since December 2013.
He spoke of the growth that Cincinnati has experienced since he took over as mayor.
“I’m proud to say that after eight years as mayor, for the first time
since 1950, the Census of Cincinnati will be up, not down,” Cranley
said, referring to the growth of the city’s population..
One of Cranley’s biggest accomplishments is starting the Ohio Innocence Project, which has freed 34 innocent people from prison since 2002.
He recounted the case of Clarence Elkins, who was put in prison for a double rape and murder which he did not commit as he was 60 miles away from where the crime occurred.
“Fast forward nine years later, we found out that the neighbor where
the crime occurred had later pled guilty to raping his own children,”
said Elkins, speaking about Earl Mann, who committed the act that Elkins was accused of. “He looked like Clarence which was a reason he was falsely convicted.”
Cranley said Mann ended up in the same prison as Elkins and they were able to obtain his DNA from a
cigarette he smoked, which proved to be a match.
“We took the saliva from the cigarette butt and he matched it to the rape kit of both bodies,” said Cranley. “We not only proved that
our man was innocent, we solved the murder. Now the other guy's
doing life without parole and our guy is a free man.”
Other successes include reducing the poverty in Cincinnati and
helping the city move to be more carbon neutral.
“Winning Ohio is going to be
hard, but it's not as hard as getting an innocent man out of prison who's already been convicted by a
jury of their peers,” he said. “I’m a fighter, I get results, I don't give
up and I'm inspired by people who have been
mistreated and I care deeply about trying to right wrongs.”
Also Saturday, Democratic candidate for the U.S. House to represent Ohio’s 4th Congressional District Jeffrey Sites was on hand
to talk about his platform.
Sites believes in health care for all and
enacting legislation to reverse climate change.
“I personally believe we should call it ‘health care for all,’” he
said. “It doesn't matter if we're old, young or whatever.”
Sites admitted that going up against Jordan is a battle, but he feels it’s the right thing to do.
He said he doesn’t know what Ohio’s 4th
District will look like as Census numbers
have been slow to come in and they
might not be released until the end of September.
“I’m going on a premise that everything's going to stay the same,” he said about the district layout, “and if they change, so be it, we'll adjust, but I'm still going after Jim Jordan.”
There to talk about the elections process as well as the November election, Auglaize County Board of Elections Director Michelle Wilcox was on hand Saturday.
She applauded Mercer County as being
one of the six counties who were above an
80% voter turnout. Auglaize County
came close, at 79.86% voter turnout.
She talked about Ohio House bills and
Senate bills that are currently ongoing, providing feedback for different ones including Senate Bill 294, which is centered around voter drop
boxes and how voters will only be able to
utilize them 10 days
before voting deadlines.
“What the Democrats want to do is expand drop boxes,” she
said. “We don't need a drop box in every tiny village, let that be a local decision by a bipartisan board. Let them agree bipartisan what is best for their
county. Let's not have the state tell us how
many drop boxes [to have].”
She explained how secure the drop box is in Wapakoneta as it’s a steel box that has to
be opened by a Democrat and a Republican.
“It has two different locks and it has a camera on it,” she said. “What are we going to
do? The residents of Auglaize County used that to put their taxes
in last week. We use it
for registrations … we use it now all year long. If nothing else,
just keep it for 20 to 30 days prior. Let us have
access to that box.”
Van Wert resident Magdalene Markward,
running for the 82nd House District of Ohio, a seat currently held by Craig Riedel, also
spoke on Saturday.