Voters get pitch from Bush to cast their ballot absentee
Phone message part of Republican effort to lock up support early for president
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Alan Johnson
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH 
 
Absentee ballots from the presidential election of 1864 are stored in the Ohio secretary of state’s office. Absentee voting was widespread in that era while men were serving in the Civil War.
 

Many Ohioans were surprised recently to get a call from President Bush.

"I’m asking for your vote, it’s important," Bush said in an automated message piped into hundreds of thousands of homes and recorded on voicemail and answering machines. "Please look for your absenteeballot request form in the mail and return it as soon as possible."

In a fiercely contested presidential campaign, Republicans and Democrats are scrambling for votes in every nook and cranny of Ohio.

Absentee voters, or "early voters" as they are known in some states with fewer restrictions, are a much-coveted voting bloc. Political strategists say many are senior citizens, a highly reliable voter group. Many are conservative, favoring Republicans, and can be counted on well before Election Day.

In the 2000 presidential election, 342,296 Ohioans voted absentee, about 7 percent of the total vote. That number undoubtedly will rise this year with more military personnel on active duty in Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations.

Both Bush and Democrat John Kerry have strategies to target absentee voters, including phone calls and mailings.

For example, Democrats might concentrate on blacks and Latinos, according to The Wall Street Journal, while Republicans often look to married women with children, hoping to bridge Bush’s gender gap.

"This is really a back-to-basics campaign," said Robert Paduchik, manager of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. "It’s a vote we don’t have to worry about for 63 days." (The number of days, as of yesterday, before the election.)

Paduchik, who also managed the Bush-Cheney Ohio campaign in 2000, said courting absentees is "one small part of what we’re doing to motivate the base. Not doing it would be like running a statewide campaign and not buying television."

Timed with the president’s phone calls, the campaign mailed literature — with tearoff absentee-voter application cards and sharp criticism of Kerry — to many Ohio households.

Brendon Cull, a Democratic National Committee spokesman for the Kerry campaign, said Kerry will respond his own "significant absentee-ballot program," but he declined to provide specifics.

In the last presidential election, 333,483 civilians and 8,813 members of the armed forces cast absentee ballots in Ohio, according to Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell’s office. Those numbers do not include all counties, however, because some did not count absentee ballots separately.

Franklin County counted 27,840 civilian and 706 military absentees in 2000, a total of 28,546.

Absentee-ballot applications can be obtained by calling or visiting county boards of elections, said James Lee of the secretary of state’s office.

However, both parties also obtain applications to distribute to people they know have voted absentee in the past or those whom they target.

Many of the Bush calls have not targeted seniors or military personnel.

Although the emphasis is heightened this year, voting absentee dates back at least to the Civil War.

Blackwell’s office has dozens of envelopes containing absentee ballots cast in the Nov. 8, 1864, election pitting Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, Republicans listed as the Union Party, against Democrats George B. McClellan and George H. Pendleton, a congressman from Ohio.

The fragile paper ballots, grouped in bundles from military bases throughout the nation, are simple, including only the names of the presidential and vice presidential candidates and their electors.

Lincoln captured most votes of Ohio soldiers and 55 percent of the vote nationally.