We just passed a milestone: today alone, 50,000 voters have called the Election Protection hotlineWe are receiving many reports from frustrated Ohio voters who have been inexplicably dropped from the lists of registered voters.
Voters in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) and Franklin County (Columbus) are reporting that:
- after voting from same address for years, they suddenly have disappeared from the list at polls
- they received a voter registration card/notice of registration and precinct, as recently as this fall — yet are not on the poll registry
- they are on the statewide database (DB) but not on the poll registry
Unfortunately, the first two issues occurred repeatedly in 2004 and 2006, but have not been corrected. Cuyahoga County was the scene of various problems with the voter-registration database in recent elections. Experts say these kinds of problems can stem from mischief, programming errors, database corruption or rogue code. Whatever the cause, they disenfranchise legitimate voters and interfere with an efficient, fair and accurate election process.
Voters who experience these issues can vote with a provisional ballot, but obviously that's not an adequate substitute for casting a vote by regular ballot. We must reform our voter-registration system to prevent, or at least greatly reduce, such problems from cropping up election after election.
