Coronavirus prompts Ohio to seek delay of Tuesday's Democratic primary vote

Ohio will seek to postpone its Tuesday presidential nominating contest, the governor said on Monday, making it the first of four states due to hold Democratic primaries to call off voting amid growing concerns about the coronavirus. Officials in Ohio, Illinois, Florida and Arizona had said they would go ahead with Tuesday's votes despite a global outbreak that has forced schools, bars and restaurants to close and the cancellation of large public gatherings.

Former Vice President Joe Biden was the overwhelming favorite to best U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in all four states, according to public opinion polls. Ohio's Republican Governor Mike DeWine, in calling for a delay, said at-risk populations would be unable to vote.

"We should not force them to make this choice - a choice between their health and their constitutional duties as American citizens," DeWine said at a news conference. DeWine lacks the power to unilaterally delay the primary, but will ask a state court to rule in favor of a planned lawsuit seeking the postponement. Ohio will continue to collect absentee ballots and hope to hold the primary on June 2.

Georgia and Louisiana had already postponed primaries that had been set for March 24 and April 4, respectively. On Sunday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended cancellation of gatherings of 50 or more over the next eight weeks. U.S. task force guidelines on Monday discouraged social gatherings of more than 10 people.

The primaries in the populous states of Florida, Illinois and Ohio, as well as Arizona, had the potential to give Biden a nearly unassailable lead over Sanders, his only viable rival and a self-styled democratic socialist. To make up for a shortage of poll workers prompted by the coronavirus outbreak, officials in Cook County, the largest county in Illinois, which includes Chicago, offered $150 a day to bartenders, waiters and other service industry workers suddenly without steady income.

But James Scalzitti, spokesman for the Cook County Clerk's Office, told Reuters that despite the social media campaign his office launched, "We do remain concerned about staffing." Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs wrote on Twitter on Monday that the state government was working to keep election day "safe and accessible."

Alabama's top election official on Sunday said he had asked the state attorney general whether the state had legal authority to postpone its March 31 runoff primary election between Republican U.S. Senate candidates Jeff Sessions and Tommy Tuberville. Following his first one-on-one debate with Biden at CNN's Washington bureau on Sunday - which had no studio audience to limit possible exposure to the virus, Sanders questioned the wisdom of voting two days later.

"I'm thinking about some of the elderly people who are sitting behind the desks, registering people, doing all that stuff. Does that make a lot of sense? Not sure that it does," Sanders told CNN. Prominent leaders and groups in the Democratic Party have been coalescing around Biden. On Monday, he picked up endorsements from Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and the International Longshoremen's Association, a large maritime workers' union based in New Jersey.