Buckeye Battleground
Ohio has a new voting law that helps enfranchise the young and urban poor. So why are some conservatives fighting it?
By L. Russell Allen
September 24, 2008
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner talks in her office in Columbus, Ohio. Although Ohio’s firebrand elections chief has been succeeded by a mild-mannered lawyer, controversy lives on in the office Republican Ken Blackwell ran with such bravado. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato)Thanks to a law enacted in 2006, residents of Ohio are allowed to cast their ballot months before Election Day. This change was made with the support of both Democrats and Republicans in the state legislature and Republicans in the secretary of state and governor’s offices. But two years later as voters are taking advantage of the law for the second time the Ohio Republican Party is spearheading a lawsuit to prevent early voting.
Why is this bipartisan law now being opposed by the Ohio Republican Party? While the law hasn’t changed, the enforcer has. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat who was elected in 2006, is now enforcing a loophole in the legislation that had been disregarded in the past. The loophole allows Ohioans, who must live in the state 30 days before registering to vote, to go to the Ohio Board of Elections between Sept. 30 and Oct. 6 to register and vote absentee at the same time. This year, because of the registration window, voting will be easier for many voters who are at a higher risk of being disenfranchised: the urban poor, young voters, and voters of color. The Ohio Republican Party is citing the potential for voter fraud in its lawsuit. The issue has become a bit of a minefield for Brunner who campaigned on a platform of non-partisanship.
Regardless of who wins the election or when people vote this fall, Ohio will be the stage of a tough battle. With 20 electoral votes, there’s a lot at stake in who wins this Midwestern state. In 2004, President Bush’s margin of victory in Ohio was a mere 119,000 votes out of more than 5.5 million cast. Election experts are expecting the race to be tight in Ohio again this year.
Although Brunner is enforcing legislation created and signed by her political opponents, charges of partisanship are nothing new to the Ohio Secretary of State office. Kenneth Blackwell, a regular columnist for the conservative Town Hall and Brunner’s predecessor, allegedly engaged in voter suppression efforts in the 2004 election that were chronicled in an incendiary Rolling Stone article by Robert F, Kennedy, Jr. in 2006. This article documents Blackwell’s extralegal methods of striking registered voters from the rolls in Democratic areas.
One of Blackwell’s favorite tricks was caging, an illegal act of voter suppression. Here’s how it worked: The Ohio election officials sent mailings to registered voters. If these mailings were undeliverable or if the recipients refused to sign for the mail, then their names were taken off the voter rolls. As a result, students with different home and college addresses were disenfranchised with no legitimate way to challenge that status. Allowing college students and other Ohioans to register and immediately vote is a way to prevent many of the voting problems Ohio experienced in 2004.
Another important and fairly obvious benefit of early voting is the prevention of long lines on polling day. In 2004, cities and college campuses weren’t given the proper amount of voting equipment to handle the demand. Voters at Kenyon College, for example, were forced to wait 11 hours to cast a ballot. The wait at some inner-city precincts was three to seven hours. That’s the kind of waiting that only the most determined voters would be able to handle. In a report (PDF) issued on the 2004 Ohio election issued by the House Judicial Committee Ranking Member John Conyers a year later, “three percent of all Ohio voters who showed up to vote on Election Day were forced to leave without casting a ballot.” That’s more than 174,000 voters, which is larger than the margin by which Ohio was won in 2004. “The vast majority of this lost vote was concentrated in urban, minority, and Democratic-leaning areas,” concluded the Conyers report.
The Associated Press has reported that there are 470,000 students enrolled in Ohio’s public universities as of 2006. This includes the 52,000 enrolled at Ohio State University in the state capital of Columbus. Ohio State has the largest enrollment of any university in the country. One added wrinkle of this registration and voting window is that OSU is located in the state’s 15th congressional district, where an open seat is still polling within the margin of error.
Another pocket of new voters could be found at Ohio’s private universities. Private schools are more likely to attract out-of-state pupils because they don’t offer the same tuition discounts as public colleges and universities. Ohio is home to the University of Dayton, one of the ten largest Catholic universities in the country. Another Catholic school located in Cincinnati, Xavier University, isn’t far behind. Those schools have a combined enrollment of approximately 16,000. The numbers at the “Ohio Six,” a collection of smaller private liberal arts schools in the state (which include Oberlin College and Kenyon), adds another 10,000 or so potential voters to the rolls. If students there haven’t yet registered in Ohio, this window provides them with a great opportunity to register and avoid even the possibility of the long lines Ohio saw in 2004.
Ohio is an important state, but the problems there are an example of how disenfranchised voters are treated around the country. The partisanship shown by Blackwell’s office has shown that the office should be about protecting the interests of all voters. When electoral reform is tied up in court by the same people who helped pass it into law, it illustrates how out of control the political process has become when dealing with an issue as important and fundamental as voting. By allowing new voters to register and vote over the course of one week, many potentially disenfranchised voters will have a new opportunity to exercise their voting rights. Young and urban poor voters deserve their voting rights just as much as the legislators and candidates who passed the law in the first place.
L. Russell Allen is a blogger for Pushback.
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The republicans are doing everything they can to steal this election with dirty tricks. To see a sampling of them go to www.republicantricks…
— triumph110 - Sep 24, 07:33 PM - #Remember- videothevote.org!
— lauren - Sep 29, 12:15 PM - #