The records indicate that many voters were removed for failure to respond to a mailed notice, even though they continued to reside in the same county and some at the same voter registration address.
Verification of voter address has emerged as the key issue, not only in purge issues, but in uncounted provisional ballots. Ohio had 181,000 provisional voters, a staggeringly high number compared to only 7,000 provisional voters in Missouri and 5,000 in Virginia. These statistics come from Brunner’s first Election Summit in December 2008. In Ohio, 10% of all people voting on Election Day were forced to vote provisionally.
At the March Election Conference, Franklin County Board of Elections Deputy Director Matt Damschroder, a Republican, advocated using state and federal records to establish new addresses for Ohio voters.
Tom McCabe, Director of the Mahoning County Board of Elections, reported that 81% of provisional votes were counted in Mahoning County. He pointed out that the number would have been 90% had the pre-Ken Blackwell rules been in effect in Ohio. Prior to Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell’s supervision of Ohio’s 2004 presidential election, Ohio voters in the wrong precinct still had their votes counted from the county level to the presidential level.
McCabe also decried the fact that there is no consistent statewide standard for counting provisional ballots in Ohio. In his county, a voter who was able to produce a library card with a current address was allowed to vote, although that type of ID is not officially accepted in Ohio guidelines.
In a promising development, a handful of Ohio counties noted that they did not purge voter records from their computer systems, but merely moved questionable voter names into an “inactive” status. Some “flagged” certain voters if there were concerns about their eligibility. On another positive note, Coshocton County notified the Free Press that it is a “no purge” county.
Prior to the 2004 election, most purges were concentrated in the Democratic havens of Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. Public records show that in Cleveland, 24.93% of all voters were dumped from the voting rolls.
The pattern continued prior to the 2008 election, with an additional 211,000 Franklin County voters removed. Most were concentrated in the Democratically-controlled capital city of Columbus.
Just prior to the 2008 presidential election, the Free Press called attention to the Ohio Republican Party’s attempt to purge 600,000 long-time registered voters, and 200,000 newly-registered voters. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s intervention prevented the 800,000 purges by directing that Ohio voters had both the right to notification and hearing before being stripped of their voting rights. If the GOP had succeeded in eliminating the 800,000 overwhelmingly Democratic voters, John McCain may have carried Ohio by 50,000 votes, instead of losing by more than 200,000 votes.
A Jim Crow system of county-by-county partisan purges remains in effect in Ohio. The Buckeye State does not recognize voting as a fundamental human right. Voting is considered a universal and unalienable right in most other democracies. In Ohio, there’s no statewide system mandating all voters be treated equally before they lose their most basic and sacred right. In Ohio, often called the most Southern of Northern states, there is also no system in place that even requires giving a reason for disenfranchising a voter. No wonder the number of purged voters tripled last year.
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Bob Fitrakis has a Ph.D. in political science and was an election observer in the Ohio 2004 general election, Ohio's 2008 primary and 2008 general elections. He was the director of the Free Press Election Protection Project. This article was originally published by http://freepress.org.
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