Ohio GOP Secretary of State May Be Illegally Tossing Ballots

Maybe you weren't paying attention to what the GOP was doing in Ohio....it was pretty much the standard operating procedure that has become the norm of Republicans - when you can't legitimately win elections, suppress the vote, discard ballots, purge voting lists and commit any fraud to maintain control.

Ohio Secretary Of State May Be Illegally Tossing Ballots

By Aviva Shen on Nov 29, 2012

 

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) became the public face of vote suppression this year for his overreaching election directives, which restricted early voting hours and forbid election officials from counting legitimate votes. Though President Obama won the state, Husted has not halted his efforts.

 

With two House races heading to a recount, Husted is now facing accusations that he is illegally tossing provisional ballots. These House races will determine whether state Republicans get a super-majority to put constitutional amendments on the ballot without a single Democratic vote.

 

State representatives Kathleen Clyde (D-OH) and Debbie Phillips (D-OH) threatened to sue Wednesday evening over at least 384 ballots that have been discarded in the two districts in question, Tuscarawas and Cuyahoga. According to the state reps, some ballots were put in plain manila envelopes instead of provisional ballot envelopes, rendering them invalid. Additionally, they say Husted is rejecting ballots covered under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which allows voters who have moved to a different address within the same congressional district to vote at their former precinct.

Even more ballots are likely to have been wrongly discarded because officials are using a database already proven to be flawed and incomplete to determine the voter’s registration status.

Besides these possible breaches of federal election law, Husted is also tossing innumerable ballots that were thrown into question by poll worker error through no fault of the voter. A federal judge tried to stop him, declaring “I don’t want to see democracy die in the darkness on my watch.” But the conservative Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay that allowed Husted to throw out these votes.

Ohio leads the country in provisional ballots, with 200,000 cast this year. In 2008, the state discarded 1 out of every 5 provisional votes. These ballots are often concentrated in urban, Democratic areas — and huge percentages get discarded every election.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/11/29/1254461/ohio-secretary-of-state-may-be-illegally-tossing-ballots/

The Lengths To Which The GOP Will Go To Supress Voting

A bin of Ohio provisional ballots to be counted. (photo: ThinkProgress)

The Serious Flaw With Ohio's Plan to Count Provisional Ballots

By Aviva Shen, ThinkProgress

06 November 12

housands of Ohio voters have been falsely notified that they are not registered to vote due to a database error in Ohio's voter rolls. An Ohio voter advocacy group alerted Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) to this major system problem on October 30. But instead of fixing it, Husted issued a directive instructing local boards to use the same flawed search method to count provisional ballots after Election Day.

Ohio's computer search of the voter registration database will only find exact matches, meaning that voters could come up as unregistered due to typos, abbreviations, or partial entries. This flawed search mechanism missed huge numbers of registered voters in Franklin and Cuyahoga Counties, incorrectly rejecting 33,000 requests for absentee ballots. These two counties corrected the error, but thousands of others may have slipped through the cracks in the rest of the state. These voters were told they are not registered to vote and may be forced to use provisional ballots at the polls.

 

But if they do decide to file provisional ballots, along with a growing number of other legal voters in the state, the very same search method could disenfranchise their vote entirely. Husted has ignored warnings that the system is missing large numbers of registered voters. As the Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates, who first discovered the problem, explain:

Worse yet, Sec. Husted last night released a Directive with a proposed search method for Boards of Elections to verify registration status on provisional ballots. Yet Sec. Husted's latest recommendations for search are entirely inadequate, likely to miss thousands of voters because of mis-spelling of names, variation in form of ID, failure to use all available tools for a reasonable search and other reasons. Once again, our warnings and suggestions, sent this morning, have gone unanswered. Unless this inadequacy is corrected, several thousand provisional ballots could be wrongfully rejected as "not registered." If the election is close, this could be a source of endless legal battles.

NOVA has outlined an alternative, more accurate search method that will result in far fewer mistakes. Husted's office has not yet responded.

 

Husted's directive also jeopardizes legal ballots by shifting the burden of proof on the contested voter, even though Ohio law requires the poll worker to fill out the form. A federal judge will hear the case the morning after Election Day.

 

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/319-67/14391-focus-the-serious-flaw-with-ohios-plan-to-count-provisional-ballots