Ohio election threats

Verification, database and rejection

 * November 6, 2008. Up to 35,000 voters in Franklin County may have been required to vote on provisional ballots on election day, after a data-processing error incorrectly flagged them as ineligible to vote. Phone calls to the County Board of Elections notified them of the problem, and poll workers were told at approx. 9:30 a.m. on election day to allow flagged voters to cast regular ballots. It is unknown how many people were affected; Deputy County Elections Director Matthew Damschroder says that a full investigation will take place after other mandatory election work has been completed. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner criticized the county for the flagging error. "We'll be closely monitoring that situation, and we will work with the board to determine why the error occurred so that we can prevent that from happening again," Brunner said.


 * Common Cause rated Ohio's registration registration procedures as "unsatisfactory," citing, "Name, driver’s license number, birth date, Social Security number, and current address are used for verifying registrant’s eligibility through a statewide database. There are no matching standards currently in effect. The state has not issued any statements regarding the matching system it is using, or how it is coordinating its registration database with other statewide databases as is required by HAVA."

Notification and appeal

 * Common Cause rated Ohio's registration notification procedures as "unsatisfactory," citing, "Boards of elections no longer required to notify registrants that their registration applications have been rejected."

NVRA implementation

 * Common Cause rated this as "inconclusive," citing, "State reports it is in compliance with §7 provisions of NVRA; independent research suggests that these provisions are not being fully enforced, or that there has been a significant drop-off in the extent to which the state is enforcing the provision. Secretary of State has implemented a NVRA leadership team to increase NVRA implementation in agencies."

Student voting rights

 * Common Cause rated this as "mixed," citing, "The Ohio Secretary of State’s website says that students may register to vote so long as they intend “to reside permanently in the Ohio county” where their “school residence address is located.” Student identification or a university utility bill with the student’s address suffices as voter identification."

Felon voting rights
Quoting from an October, 2008 report on "de facto disenfranchisement" (summary)(download PDF) co-published by the Brennan Center for Justice and the ACLU:

"'Ohio [...] permits those convicted of misdemeanors to vote. But interviews with local election officials in 2008 revealed that 30% responded incorrectly or expressed uncertainty about whether or not individuals with misdemeanor convictions could vote. Most troubling, a representative from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office advised that individuals incarcerated for misdemeanors may not vote in Ohio.'"

See also "felon disenfranchisement" issue page

Voter education

 * Common Cause rated Ohio's sample ballot practices in 2008 as "mixed," saying that only "some counties provide sample ballots on their websites," while "some counties send sample ballots to voters," and that, by law, "sample ballots may be printed by the board of elections." (emphasis added)


 * Common Cause rated Ohio's language accessibility as "inconclusive," because the information is only available in English.


 * Common Cause rated Ohio's voting machine education as "unsatisfactory," saying that some counties provide voting machine demonstrations at local events.

Absentee and early voting

 * Oct 31, 2008: Approx. 2700 absentee ballots have been set aside by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections due to mistakes in how the ballots were placed in their return envelopes. Notifications were sent to those affected, who have until Nov. 14 to correct the errors.

"'The form contained an extra box to check indicating you were a registered voter -- respondents who sent back the form without checking the box will not receive absentee ballots as per their request. The Board of Elections found that although the box was not required on the form, returning the form without checking the box is tantamount to requesting a ballot without being a registered voter.'"
 * September, 2008. There are multiple reports   that absentee ballot applications sent by the McCain campaign were invalidated because of a flawed form.

Voter caging, purging and other eligibility challenges
Note: please also see section "Voter Registration: Verification, database and rejection" at top of page for current news items.


 * November 24, 2008. Following the charges of "vote fraud" that were used to justify the efforts to block registrations of tens or hundreds of thousands of voters, there were a total of two (2) reports of problem votes.


 * November 4, 2008. Election Protection coalition reports many voters showing up to vote and finding they are not on the registration rolls, particularly Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) and Franklin County (Columbus).


 * September 20, 2008. Project Vote warns that "significant numbers of minority voters will be included on the county-generated caging lists" if voters are removed without a hearing after the state mailed letters marked "Do not forward" and over 500,000 were returned as undeliverable.


 * In September, 2008, the Ohio Republican party sued the Ohio Secretary of State in an attempt to block 666,000 new voters from being added to the registration rolls. On October 15, 2008, a federal court ruled that Ohio had until the following Friday to set up a system to verify the eligibility of about 666,000 newly registered voters and make the information available to the state's 88 county election boards. .  This ruling threatened to disenfranchise more than 200,000 of the newly-registered Ohio voters.  Two days later the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in, ruling that the voters could remain on the voting rolls.   Following this ruling Ohio Secretary of State Brunner, a Democrat, received death threats, suspicious packages containing white powder in the mail and threatening phone calls.  On October 25 President Bush, in an unprecedented pre-election move, ordered the Justice Department to "look into" whether 200,000 new Ohio voters must reconfirm their registration information. On October 29 the Justice Department declined to require the state to disclose the names of voters whose data did not exactly match other databases.


 * On September 30, 2008, the Brennan Center for Justice released a comprehensive report on voter purging . Appendix A of the report, titled Ohio Case Study, begins, "As of the 2006 election, Ohio had 7,860,052 registered voters, and the state reported that 416,744 registrants (5.3% of total registrants) were deleted from the registration rolls in 2006."  Purging methods listed in the case study are:


 * Change of Address. The report says Ohio does not have consistent methods for determining whether voters have changed their address; no consistent criteria for matching names of voters to address change lists; there is no consistent deadline for registrants to respond to a confirmation notice -- all giving counties wide latitude in deciding who to remove.


 * Duplicates. Ohio does not have consistent methods for removing duplicate registrations, sometimes resulting in the removal pof voters with similar names or addresses.


 * Death. Different counties use different methods for determining whether a voter has died. Some use obituaries, which do not include addresses, and the wrong voter can be removed.


 * Criminal Conviction. While Ohio law says people cannot vote while incarcerated, many counties remove voters after incarceration, even if incarcerated for as little as an hour. There are no procedures for ensuring that npeople with similar names are not removed.


 * Adjudication of Mental Incapacitation. Ohio does not have "clear and consistent protocols governing this type of removal to ward off the temptation to purge inappropriately."


 * Voter Inactivity. At least one county sends confirmation notices after each election to all those who did not vote in the election. In other counties the boards of elections send confirmation notices in odd years to any registrant who did not vote in the last two federal general elections. Voters must then update their information to remain registered.

Voter intimidation and deception

 * Nov 3, 2008. According to CNN, voters in Ohio are reporting robo-calls that provide misleading information about the voting schedule. The calls say that this year Democrats will vote on November 5. In addition, some voters report receiving incorrect polling location information via robo-call.


 * Greene County: Republican Sheriff investigating everyone who recently registered, leading to charges of voter intimidation and vote suppression.

Past Problems

 * 10/22/2004 Franklin County. Reports of about a dozen voters contacted by someone claiming to be from the county Board of Elections, telling them their voting location was changed.


 * 11/3/2004 In Trumbull County, a voter in Warren Township precinct D arrived at the polls to discover that someone had already voted in her name. The person who used her name apparently forged her signature and wrote that she lived at a different address. Board of Elections allowed her to cast a ballot.


 * 11/14/2004 Summit County. 29 voters voted absentee and then again on provisional ballots.


 * 11/24/2004 Election observers from the Ukraine observed city water departments in Ohio turning off the water of African Americans on election day and telling them they had to stay home to wait for a repairman so they would not vote.


 * 12/13/2004 Hocking County. A technician from the punch card voting machine company, Triad, altered the contents of a central tabulator while the recount was in process. He also suggested a "cheat sheet" counters could use to ensure that the hand count results matched the machine count.


 * 12/18/2004 Voters in Ohio challenge the presidential election, charging the Bush campaign with fraud.


 * 11/7/2006 Athens County. Prosecutor warns of fraudulent calls telling people their precinct had been changed.

Voter ID requirements

 * Nov. 4, 2008: Confusion over what constitutes valid I.D. has led some polling location judges to issue provisional ballots in error. According to Hamilton County Board of Elections Director Sally Krisel, a state-issued photo I.D. with an incorrect or outdated address still constitutes valid I.D., but poll workers unclear on the law are still requiring provisional ballots in some cases.

Polling place accessibility and wait times

 * Nov. 2, 2008. Sunday's wait times in Columbus, Ohio reached up to six hours for early voting. According to Franklin County Spokesman Michael Stinziano, lines began forming at 6:30 a.m. -- well before the polls opened at 1 p.m. -- and remained long throughout the day. All voters who were in line by 5 p.m. would be allowed to vote.

Voting machine and ballot distribution
"The Advancement Project, founded seven years ago by a group of civil rights lawyers, said an inadequate number of voting machines and poll workers could result in extremely long lines in battleground states.
 * The Advancement Project warns that "an inadequate number of voting machines and poll workers could result in extremely long lines" in Ohio.

"What we're seeing now in Toledo, Lucas County, and more broadly across the state and all the states are insufficient resources to accommodate everybody who wants to vote," said Jim Freeman, Project Advancement staff attorney. "That could lead to wide disparities in precincts across jurisdictions if machines are allocated inefficiently. We're concerned about a disproportionate effect on communities of color."


 * Common Cause rated this as "unsatisfactory," citing, "Law calls for there to be a “sufficient” number of voting booths."


 * In suburban Shaker Heights in Cuyahoga County, the first four voters were only issued the second page of the ballots, which did not include the presidential slate. Board of Elections spokeswoman Kimberly Bartlett said that the ballots were subsequently voided, and correct ballots issued in their place.

Malfunctioning voting machinery

 * For an extensive log of voting machine problems, see the VotersUnite! report on election incidents.


 * November 5, 2008. Columbus-area voting machines were reported to change some people's votes.

Past Problems

 * 11/2/2004 Cincinnati. Problems with punch card voting machines delayed the start of voting for up to an hour Tuesday morning at a suburban precinct. Voters were unable to slide their punch-card ballots all the way into any of the six voting machines that had ALL evidently been damaged in transit.


 * 11/2/2004 In Columbus, Ohio, overcharged batteries on Danaher Controls ELECTronic 1242 systems kept machines from booting up properly at the beginning of the day.


 * 11/3/2004 Mahoning County. The glass on top of one ES&S iVotronic electronic screen was too far from the screen, making it difficult for people to use their fingers to cast ballots. A screen went blank on a Youngstown voter while he cast his ballot.


 * 11/3/2004 Mahoning County. 20 to 30 ES&S iVotronic machines that needed to be recalibrated during the voting process because some votes for a candidate were being counted for that candidate's opponent.


 * 11/3/2004 Mahoning County. About a dozen ES&S iVotronic machines needed to be reset because they essentially froze.


 * 11/3/2004 Toledo. At the Birmingham polling site in East Toledo, the sole machine broke down around 7 a.m. An hour later, when Ohio House Rep. Peter Ujvagi tried to cast his ballot, the poll worker told him to place his ballot in a secure slot so that it could be scanned in later.


 * 11/3/2004 Toledo. Throughout the city, polling places reported an assortment of problems, ranging from technical trouble with Lucas County's leased optical-scan voting machines to confusion about precinct boundaries and questions over provisional balloting.


 * 11/3/2004 Lucas County Election Director Paula Hicks-Hudson said the Diebold optical scan machines jammed during testing last week.


 * 11/3/2004 Lucas County (Toledo). Technical problems snarled the process throughout the day. Jammed or inoperable voting machines were reported throughout the city.


 * 11/3/2004 Knox County. Due to an equipment malfunction the wait was at least 1 1/2 hours long.


 * 11/3/2004 Cuyahoga County. Diebold scanner fails one of four pre-election tests. Michael Vu said, "It's not unusual in the testing that we find an anomaly. Our testing is going over and beyond the normal testing of the past." The officials will check the calibration. Some machines may be too sensitive and will be set aside and replaced.


 * 11/4/2004 Trumbull County and elsewhere in the state. Diebold touch screens fail to display one of the pages of text for Issue 2 when they are in "large-text mode".


 * 11/4/2004 Knox County. Kenyon College student Maggie Hill appeared on the "Today Show" Wednesday morning. She was one of hundreds of students and other Gambier residents who waited for up to 10 hours to cast their votes. Observers in the Gambier precinct said there were only two voting machines for 1,300 voters. Each machine, they said, is designed to handle 20 voters per hour.


 * 11/4/2004 Columbus. A Danaher ELECTronic 1242 computer error with a voting machine cartridge gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. A cartridge from one of three voting machines at the polling place generated a faulty number at a computerized reading station. Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections said the cartridge was retested Thursday and there were no problems. He couldn't explain why the computer reader malfunctioned.


 * 11/4/2004 Mercer County. One voting machine showed that 289 people cast (punch card) ballots, but only 51 votes were recorded for president. The county's Web site appeared to show a similar conflict, reporting that 51,818 people cast ballots but 47,768 ballots were recorded in the presidential race, including 61 write-ins. It would appear that about 4,000 votes (nearly 7%) could be unaccounted for.


 * 11/7/2004 Cuyahoga County. Forty-three of the county’s 573 voting places either failed to open on time or couldn’t get some or all of their electronic voting machines to work. Voters were turned away.


 * 11/7/2004 Stark County. Diebold touch screens weren't working, and voters were told they would have to vote provisional ballots, which aren't counted until 10 days after the election. In some polling locations, voters had to touch the screen as many as 15 times to get it to register a vote.


 * 11/8/2004 Athens County. ES&S 650 misfed ballots until repaired by a technician.


 * 11/8/2004 Clermont County. "Voting glitches in Clermont County are causing delays in ballot tallying. Officials said perforations at the top of a new ballot design jammed the counters, and some ballots were not cut properly, so they had to be fed through the machines more than once. New software also gave out inaccurate reports and had to be corrected.


 * 11/8/2004 Lucas County. "Technical issues," difficulties with the memory cards, and "problems with the new technology" (Diebold touch screens) were some of the causes of the "chaos" in the election. Chain of custody issues, too: "But the scene at midnight was one of chaos on the third floor, with the special red and green bags holding memory cartridges and printed tapes of votes lining the hallways, piled on the floor in the elections office, and dumped in a large cart sitting unattended near the elevators."


 * 11/8/2004 Delays in many counties were attributed to machine problems and lack of training in the 44 counties that used new touch screens and optical scanners in this election.


 * 11/8/2004 Medina County. The new Diebold touch screen system reported incomplete results as complete, because the computer program that made that determination was based on polling places, not on the number of precincts. David Baer, spokesman for Diebold Elections Systems, said that they can report results in a number of ways and that first-time users often find they need to tweak the reporting programs to get the kinds of reports they need.


 * 11/8/2004 Lucas County. Some voters left without voting when the new Diebold voting machines weren't up and running when the polls were supposed to open. Memory cards couldn't be found at one polling place; voting machines couldn't be found at another.


 * 11/8/2004 Stark County. Poll workers ran into problems setting up the Diebold voting machines. Some panicked when they attempted to assemble the machines and the machines didn't work properly. 42 workers ran to polling stations to help. Operations weren't fully running until mid-morning.


 * 11/8/2004 Montgomery County. Ballot programming error. The wrong candidates were displayed on the touch screens (Diebold).


 * 11/8/2004 Montgomery County. Diebold touch screens show "low paper error" in 30 to 40 precincts (explained as a result of jostling during transport). Some poll workers had trouble inserting memory cards into the machines, and in two precincts machines were taken out of service in the morning because of malfunctions.


 * 11/8/2004 Wood County. New Diebold touch screen machines weren't up an running at many precincts when the polls opened. "But all precincts had at least one machine up by 6:40 a.m. and all machines in the majority of the county were available for voters by about 7:30 a.m."


 * 11/8/2004 Butler County. "In Butler County, the debut of touch-screen voting machines -- and some technical foul-ups associated with them -- caused at least six or seven polling places to open up to a half hour late on Tuesday, county elections officials said." Phone lines were jammed with requests for technical assistance.


 * 11/9/2004 Mahoning County. One precinct in Youngstown, Ohio, recorded a negative 25 million votes, which was discarded from official results. [ES&S iVotronic voting machines]


 * 11/9/2004 Athens County. M100 precinct scanners failed to scan ballots in at least two polling places.


 * 11/13/2004 Franklin County. Five of the 19 iVotronic machines in four precincts were inoperable for at least part of Election Day. ES&S technicians who refused to identify themselves repaired the machines and placed them back in use.


 * 11/16/2004 Sandusky County elections officials discovered some ballots in nine precincts were counted twice. [ES&S optical scan] The county doesn't yet know how it happened.

Provisional ballots

 * Preliminary tallies show that Ohioans cast 193,000 provisional ballots in 2008, an increase of almost 22% from 2004—despite there being fewer votes cast overall. The increase has led to calls for an examination of the use of provisionals in the state and demands for more research into the cause. While historically a high portion of provisional ballots have been accepted in Ohio (81% in 2006), concerns about future delays and lawsuits continue to mount.


 * Under election law, boards of elections cannot even begin counting provisional ballots until Nov. 13. Because that's a Saturday, many boards may wait until Nov. 15, the following Monday, to begin counting.

Eligibility verification

 * Common Cause rated this as "unsatisfactory," citing, "Provisional ballots are counted if: a local election authority determines that the voter who cast the ballot is eligible to vote in that precinct; the voter did not bring proper identifi cation to the polls but presents identification to the board of elections within ten days of the election."

Ballots cast in wrong precinct

 * Common Cause rated this as "unsatisfactory," citing, "Provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct will not be counted."

"Over 10,600 provisional ballots were rejected in Ohio in 2006 because they were cast in the wrong precinct. Ohio alone accounted for over one in three of the provisional ballots so rejected nationwide. In Cuyahoga County, 34 percent of these invalid provisional votes were cast in the correct polling place, though the wrong precinct. Another 30 percent were cast within two miles of the voters’ correct precincts.6 This is especially troubling because Ohio law requires poll workers to direct voters to their correct precinct prior to issuing a provisional ballot."
 * According to an October, 2008 Demos study,

News reports
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.
 * Ian Urbina, "States’ Purges of Voter Rolls Appear Illegal," New York Times, October 9, 2008. Mentions Ohio as one of the states.

[. . .] The screening or trimming of voter registration lists in the six states — Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina — could also result in problems at the polls on Election Day: people who have been removed from the rolls are likely to show up only to be challenged by political party officials or election workers, resulting in confusion, long lines and heated tempers.


 * "County officials seeking Ohio voters' records," Associated Press, October 9, 2008.