Ohio counties removed more than 460,000 voter registrations in two purges last year. But thousands of errors emerged last summer ahead of the second mass cancellation of voter registrations. DispatchAlerts
ASHLAND, Ohio — A week before Election Day 2016, Bill Gedraitis drove into town to cast an early vote that helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency.
“The system we have in place right now is prone to error — human error, vendor error,” LaRose said. “It’s unacceptably messy.”On Aug. 9, 2016, former Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, now the lieutenant governor, directed county boards of elections to send notices to voters that they had four years to either vote or respond to the notice.
If the registrant fails to respond to a confirmation mailing and fails to vote in two consecutive federal general elections after the mailing “Voter purges are a potential lever for voter suppression. If they’re done wrong, if there are mistakes, if there’s malice and the purges are undertaken in an irresponsible way, which results in eligible voters in large numbers being kicked off the rolls, that we view as voter suppression,” said Max Feldman, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice.
In Columbus, Franklin County elections officials identified about 1,100 others who were flagged for removal for inactivity, even though they had signed petitions.Increased attention prompted thousands of other voters to contact elections boards or the secretary of state’s office to update their registrations. Of about 235,000 registrations on the state’s last-chance list for September, 194,000 were actually purged.
Voters cast ballots at an elementary school in Westerville, Ohio, on Nov. 5, 2019. During that election, dozens of Ohio voters whose registrations had been purged showed up and cast provisional ballots. A settlement in August between a voting-rights group and the Ohio Secretary of State made that possible.That included Gedraitis and eight other voters in Ashland County, roughly halfway between Cleveland and Columbus.
Reporters also found 12 voters who county boards marked as removed for inactivity, but who had been removed for other reasons. Some had died, LaRose’s office said. Several were removed under a separate set of rules for those who cast provisional ballots. Race is not included in voter-registration records. But an analysis of the racial makeup of those purged in January 2019 that determined each voter’s likely race using census data connected to the voter’s surname and address estimated that 11.9% of those purged were black. That roughly matches Ohio’s population makeup.Voting rights activists lost their lawsuit to stop Ohio from canceling registrations for inactivity.
That settlement now is known as the APRI exception, for the A. Philip Randolph Institute that brought the lawsuit against the stateThe APRI exception stems from the lawsuit that the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an African-American union group affiliated with the AFL-CIO, filed in 2016 to challenge Ohio’s voter purge process.
In 2019, Secretary of State Frank LaRose negotiated a settlement with the A. Philip Randolph Institute to extend that exception to voters purged for inactivity in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2019. The settlement also said those voters need only live in the same county, not at the same address.In November, during a low-turnout municipal and school-board election, dozens of voters whose registrations had been canceled cast provisional ballots that counted.
To ensure purged voters don’t walk out when presented with a provisional ballot, Washington wants to train poll workers to explain why their vote might count after all. After the September purge, in which ES&S was blamed for improperly flagging more than 1,600 registrations across 14 counties for removal, Ashland County changed vendors. It went instead with Triad, which serves the majority of Ohio counties.
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