Hearing on Ohio Election Bill
The Ohio House Elections and Ethics Committee today held a hearing on Sub HB 3, which makes significant changes to various aspects of the state's election laws. Among the areas affected by this 685 page bill are provisional voting, absentee voting, challenges to voter eligibility, recounts and contests. My testimony on the bill can be found here. Others testifying at today's hearing included Catherine Turcer of Ohio Citizen Action, Jon Greenbaum of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and Peg Rosenfeld of the League of Women Voters.

Those testifying were generally critical of the bill's language that defines "jurisdiction" to mean precincts for purposes of provisional voting. Under this language, provisional ballots won't be counted for any office if cast in the wrong precinct. On the other hand, there was strong support for the decision not to include a photo ID requirement in this bill, at least so far, as other states (including Georgia, Indiana, and Texas) have recently done. But stay tuned. There's talk of a photo ID requirement being included in a forthcoming bill, if it's not added to this one, and there's already a bill in the state senate (SB 36) that would impose a strict photo ID requirement.

One of the areas on which there was some disagreement at today's hearing was over the provision of Sub HB 3 that would allow "no fault" absentee voting by mail. That means that voters could receive and send in an absentee ballot, without any excuse. I'm opposed to such a requirement, because I think that mail-in absentee voting is the one area within our system that is genuinely subject to fraud and coercion. In addition, voters tend to make more mistakes when they vote by mail-in absentee ballot, since they don't have the benefit of error correction technology that's available with in precinct voting.

Others support no fault absentee voting on the ground that it will expand access and include more people in the voting process. While this is an important objective, in-person early voting is a better way of accomplishing it. In contrast to absentee voting, in-person early voting takes place in the privacy of the voting booth, set up at central location such as a county registrar's office or public library. It thereby preserves the secret and anonymous ballot that is a critical ingredient of system integrity. Of course, mail-in absentee voting will remain essential for elderly and disabled people who aren't able to go to a polling place. But for others, early voting is a better way to go.

The downside is that it would cost counties more to implement in-person early voting than mail-in absentee voting. But isn't that a price worth paying for an election system that expands access for everyone without sacrificing system integrity? - posted by Dan Tokaji @ 9:49 PM