Ohio won’t count ballots cast at incorrect precincts
Saturday, September 25, 2004
Mark Niquette
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH 
 
 Thousands of Ohio voters are at risk of not having their ballots counted on Election Day under state guidelines for handling provisional ballots, critics of those rules say.

Some are even calling the situation "the next hanging chad," a reference to problems in the 2000 presidential election.

"It’s a huge issue," said Daniel P. Tokaji, a voting-rights lawyer and assistant professor of law at Ohio State University. Provisional voting allows properly registered voters to cast ballots even when their names don’t appear on registration rolls at the polls because they moved or they were left off.

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell recently issued a directive to county election officials saying they are allowed to count provisional ballots only from voters who go to the correct polling location for their home address.

Voting-rights groups had pushed for a more liberal directive allowing votes for at least the presidential and statewide offices to be counted, even if a voter casts a provisional ballot in the wrong precinct.

The Ohio Voter Protection Project, a coalition of votingrights groups, is considering a lawsuit to challenge that directive before the Nov. 2 election, project attorney Sean Grayson said yesterday.

Similar lawsuits have been filed in Colorado, Florida and Missouri; the Florida lawsuit was rejected this week.

Ohio is one of 29 states that will not count provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct, said Dan Seligson, editor of electionline.org, a nonpartisan Web site covering voting procedures.

Seventeen states will count at least the presidential and statewide races on provisional ballots from voters in wrong precincts, while five states have no pre-election registration requirement, he said.

Ohio has had provisional balloting for more than a decade, mostly to accommodate residents who moved but did not their voter registration. Such ballots are not counted for 10 days while election workers verify voter eligibility.

But after election problems were magnified by the razorclose 2000 presidential race — including eligible voters wrongly being turned away from the polls — Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002.

Part of that act, known as HAVA, requires states that did not have provisional voting to adopt it for voters who believe they are properly registered. That allows their vote to be counted if eligibility is confirmed later.

In Franklin County and other areas with electronic voting machines, voters typically are given a punch-card machine at the polls to cast a provisional ballot.

But HAVA says state laws will determine how provisional ballots are counted, and Ohio’s law clearly says voters may not cast ballots in a precinct where they do not live, Blackwell spokesman Carlo LoParo said.

Blackwell has ordered that if residents go to the wrong precinct, poll workers must find their correct precinct and tell them where to go, LoParo said. They may also cast provisional ballots at their county election board.

Critics argue that on a busy Election Day with potentially long lines, harried poll workers may not follow through or voters may not have the time or transportation to go elsewhere.

Critics also worry that with tens of thousands of new voters registering for this fall’s election — and precinct boundaries and polling locations have changed since past elections — many voters won’t know or be told their correct polling place.

"The intent behind HAVA was to liberalize the process," Grayson said. "It seems to me Ohio is going in the opposite direction."

Observers say there’s no way to predict how many voters may be affected, and LoParo disputes the suggestion that it will be a large number. He noted that 93 percent of the 54,137 provisional ballots cast in the 2002 general election were counted, and 91 percent of the nearly 100,000 ballots in 2000.

Still, Kay Maxwell, national president of the League of Women Voters, says that’s too many lost votes. She thinks the Ohio law violates at least the spirit of HAVA, and it could be a critical problem if the presidential election is as close as pundits expect.

"Any single voter who is disfranchised is one too many," Maxwell said yesterday during a visit to Columbus.

The key will be educating both poll workers and voters before the election about the process, said Michael Sciortino, president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials and director of the Mahoning County elections board.

Sciortino advises voters who are unsure about where to vote to call their county board of election before Election Day.

"It has a potential of being a very big issue, and how we train and how we prepare for it will dictate how we handle the situation," he said.