This is a repost of https://esrati.com/esrati-files-for-congress-in-oh-10/19953
Democrat, David Esrati, 61, filed 130 signatures today with the Montgomery County Board of Elections for Congress to challenge Mike Turner R, for the Ohio tenth district. Only 50 are necessary for ballot access. Esrati has had multiple challenges to his petitions from the hyper-partisan BOE over the years. The fact that the Montgomery County Democratic Party defacto endorsed Mike Turner despite Esrati winning a 4 way primary in 2022 is a good reason for him to be wary of the BOE.
Esrati, a Dayton Ohio resident, has run for Mayor of Dayton, Dayton City Commission multiple times, and this will be the third time on the ballot for Congress. He lost to Sharon Neuhart in a 5 way primary in 2012. Esrati owns an advertising agency, The Next Wave, has written the Dayton centric blog, esrati.com (you’re on it) since 2005, is an Army Veteran and community activist. He runs 2 non-profits, Reconstructing Dayton focused on bringing unigov to Montgomery County and The Modern Policy Institute which promotes open source solutions to help educate voters and implement open transparent representative government. He has a long history with Mike Turner, running against him in 1993 for Mayor in the primary, and later having Turner illegally arrest him in a commission meeting for exercising his first amendment rights to protest symbolically and silently at a public meeting.
So far, only one other candidate has filed and been approved on the ballot, Joseph S. Kuzniar of Enon, who has never voted in a Democratic primary, despite a voting record back to 2010. Kuzinar, born in 1942, is a Biden aged 80+. A retired Air Force Lt. Col, he came in to meet me to ask how to run. I had to download the petition for him. His petitions were certified 11/21/2023. When I told him it costs about a million to be taken seriously, he seemed undeterred and confused about what that money goes for. Kuzniar doesn’t have a website or even a Facebook page for his campaign.
Turner turned in his petitions 12/7/2023 and will probably be certified at the BOE meeting tomorrow, Dec 15. The filing deadline is the 20th.
Kirk Benjamin who came in last in the 2022 primary has taken out petitions but not yet filed. You can watch a video of him by Reconstructing Dayton, explaining his campaign here: https://reconstructingdayton.org/2022/04/28/an-interview-with-kirk-benjamin/ (sorry about the camera info on the video, it was during Covid- and this was the first use of the streaming equipment by a new employee).
Amy Cox who last ran for State Representative in 2022 in Ohio-40, has a website up claiming she’s running for Congress. The Preble County resident lost that race 71-29% to Rodney Creech. Yes, candidates can run for Congress who don’t live in their district- like Niraj Antani running for OH-2 in Cincinnati while living here. I included Amy in my effort last time to bring attention to all the democratic candidates fighting the good fight with little party support on this site: www.electionsnotauctions.com
There is a wild card independent gathering signatures to run in the November Election. Michael Harbaugh owns the Wild Banana food truck and has a website up: https://www.harbaugh4congress.com/ His threshold for ballot access is a whopping 2,800 signatures to qualify- which means collecting almost twice that. An interesting fact, while local petitions require no more signatures than the number of seats open, there is no restriction on signatures for Congress- a voter can sign as many petitions for a candidate from their party (or if they are undeclared) as they want.
Harbaugh’s petitions aren’t due till March 18, 2024, the day before the party primaries.
The Montgomery County Board of Elections will not certify my petition, or any other filed before the turn in date until their first board meeting on 2 January 2024. They will tell me their recommendation on Monday (a first).
The Primary in Ohio for Federal candidates is Tuesday, March 19, 2024. At this point, Turner has no Republican party primary challenger.