In a last-ditch effort, a few Republicans led by previous Gov. John Kasich and current Secretary of State Frank LaRose sided with the state's Democrats to release the full list of those to be purged to voting activist groups to try to crowdsource the list. The activists, including the League of Women Voters, found that some 40,000 voters were set to be purged incorrectly, and mysteriously the vast majority of those to be disenfranchised were registered Democrats...including the director of the League of Women Voters herself.
Ohio, where the Democratic presidential candidates are set to debate Tuesday, is both a battleground state and the site of some of the country’s strictest voting laws, from voter ID requirements to a “use-it-or-lose-it” provision that lets officials drop voters seen as inactive.
The combination has led voting rights advocates to contend that parts of the state are regularly disenfranchised, largely in purges aimed at those who have died or moved away, but which also hit real voters who don’t learn they can’t vote until Election Day. Election officials in other battlegrounds such as Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Texas regularly purge their voter lists as well.
This year, a group of elected officials in the state, mostly all moderate Republicans, tried to answer the concerns with an experiment of their own: Rather than purge the voter rolls behind closed doors as had been done in the past, the government released the full list of those to be removed this summer, and gave the list to advocacy groups. The groups said they found the list was riddled with errors.
The result: Around 40,000 people, nearly one in five names on the list, shouldn’t have been on it, the state determined. And it only found out before anyone was actually turned away at a polling place largely because of volunteer sleuthing.
Few people had expected a problem at that scale.
But the process gave hope to people working on voting rights, who for years had pushed the state to be more transparent in how it was maintaining its voter rolls. Moderate Republicans, caught between advocacy groups pushing for fewer purges and more conservative leaders in other states urging for more, think they may have found a way to thread the needle.
“We’re talking about crowdsourcing, in simply putting the list out there,” said Frank LaRose, Ohio’s secretary of state, whose office oversaw the purge and who manages the election here.
Ohio’s needle-threading experiment this year — the only time advocates say a state government has released a list ahead of time — also offers one of the first looks at how so many names could be incorrectly removed from the rolls.
In one case, a data mistake from an outside firm meant a large number of people’s names were set to be knocked off. Ohio’s 88 counties each used a different process of removing people from the rolls, an immediate source of headaches for officials trying to compile a statewide list.
And voting rights groups found an unexplained tranche — around 20,000 people — who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections. These voters were in Franklin County, a Democratic stronghold in the state.
For those of you playing at home, Franklin County, Ohio is the capital of Columbus and its surrounding suburbs. There's about 850,000 registered voters as of 2018 according to the county's board of election website, and the county voted nearly 2-to-1 for Clinton in 2016. 20,000 or more would have lost their right to vote if this hadn't been caught heading into 2020.
Yeah, that's right, half the "errors" in the previous secretary of state's planned purge came from the bluest county in the state. That guy? Jon Husted? He is now Lieutenant Governor, by the way, under Gov. DeWine.
Weird how that works, huh.
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