Strickland keeps moving out in front of Blackwell, now with his biggest margin yet:

Democrat Ted Strickland has a nearly 2-1 lead over Republican Ken Blackwell with three weeks left in the race for governor, a poll released Wednesday shows.

The Quinnipiac University poll found 59 percent of likely Ohio voters favored Strickland, a Methodist minister and six-term congressman, while 32 percent backed Blackwell, Ohio’s conservative secretary of state and a favorite of the religious right.

The attempt to prevent Strickland from voting this year has also hit a road bump. The Assistant Secretary of State returned the complaint to the county election board. It turns out the board didn’t even investigate the claim and instead just voted.

Yesterday, the New York Times published an editorial about Strickland’s residency questions. The New York Times put a darker slant to the story, saying the Blackwell could decide if Strickland was eligible to run:

Voters in Ohio can be forgiven if they feel they have been beamed out of the Midwest and dropped into a third-world autocracy. The latest news from the state’s governor’s race is that the Republican nominee, Kenneth Blackwell, who is also the Ohio secretary of state, could rule that his opponent is ineligible to run because of a technicality. We’d like to think that his office would not ultimately do that, or that if it did, such a ruling would not be allowed to stand. But the mere fact that an elected official and political candidate has the authority to toss his opponent out of a race is further evidence of a serious flaw in our democracy.

(H/T Nicole)

As the other article points out, the issue is not if Strickland can run. A protest for that would have had to been filed 64 days before the primary (which would be in February) under state law. The issue is if Strickland and his wife are allowed to vote in their registered precinct. In order to run for Governor in Ohio, the candidate must be a “qualified elector” per the Ohio Constitution. He is still a qualified elector and even if the ruling is against Strickland, that would not change. He would instead be electing via a provisional ballot. Even if this issue would be viable to remove Strickland from running, questions would be raised to Blackwell’s office, who validated Strickland’s candidacy requirements at the beginning of the year.

Ohio Senate Race

A couple more polls have come out in the DeWine/Brown race since I did the update yesterday

Combined with yesterday’s numbers, DeWine has 39.6% and Brown has 48% (average difference had Brown ahead by 7.4% yesterday, today that has increased to 8.4%).

If you want to help any of these candidates out, there is still time to donate.

(h/t TPMCafe for the polls).