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Tag: voter discrimination
In Ohio, A Spelling Error Could Nullify Your Vote

In Ohio, A Spelling Error Could Nullify Your Vote

By John Whitesides and Andy Sullivan

COLUMBUS, Ohio/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Voting is no easy task for Roland Gilbert. The 86-year-old retired Ohio lawyer, who is legally blind, completes his absentee ballot with help from a machine that magnifies the print.

So the registered Democrat was not completely surprised to learn he had made an error in filling out his 2014 ballot, entering that day’s date in the birthdate field.

What surprised him was that it cost him his vote. Local election officials rejected it because it did not perfectly match his registration information on file.

“It didn’t seem right,” Gilbert said. “I felt foolish for making a silly mistake.”

Laws passed by the Republican-led Ohio state legislature in 2014 require voters to accurately fill out their personal information on absentee or provisional ballots or they will be rejected – even if the votes are otherwise valid. The laws are being applied in a presidential election for the first time this year.

A Reuters analysis found that where a voter lives can determine whether their provisional or absentee ballot counts in Ohio. The law requiring a perfect match on information such as name, address, birthdate, signature and ID number has been enforced unequally county to county, federal data and court documents show, with local officials sometimes using wide latitude in applying the standards.

The disparity could hurt Democrats in Ohio, a vital battleground in the Nov. 8 election between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton. The 14 Ohio counties with the most restrictive enforcement accounted for 53 percent of Ohio’s total vote in 2012 and gave Democratic President Barack Obama 60 percent of the votes he won in Ohio.

More than half of the provisional and absentee votes discarded for minor errors in 2014 came from five large, Democratic-dominated urban counties: Lucas, home to the city of Toledo; Cuyahoga, which includes Cleveland; Franklin, home to the state capital, Columbus; Summit, which includes Akron, the fifth-largest city in the state; and Hamilton County, home of Cincinnati.

While the number of votes rejected for technical reasons was small in the 2014 congressional election, when nearly 3,000 absentee and provisional ballots were thrown out, those totals are likely to swell in a presidential election, when more people will vote.

The number of discarded ballots could go even higher in Ohio after a court ruled that tens of thousands of voters who had been purged from the state voter rolls can cast provisional ballots, expanding the possible pool of disputed votes.

A provisional ballot is used to record a vote when there are questions about a voter’s eligibility. Election boards, split evenly between Republicans and Democrats in Ohio, then examine the provisional ballots to determine if the vote should count.

COURT CHALLENGE

“There are going to be thousands of indisputably registered and eligible voters in Ohio who are going to be disenfranchised solely because they made trivial, immaterial errors and omissions on forms,” said attorney Subodh Chandra, who has led a court challenge to the laws on behalf of a homeless coalition and the Ohio Democratic Party.

A federal district judge threw out the provisions requiring a perfect match on personal information as discriminatory earlier this year, but most were later restored by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court did remove the requirement that voters accurately fill in their address and birthdate on the absentee form – any vote cast by mail or in person prior to Election Day – but kept the requirement for the other fields on both types of ballots.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected without explanation a request for an emergency stay of the appeals court ruling that would have allowed ballots with those technical mistakes to be counted.

A spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, said the 2014 laws were aimed at finding a balance between making it “easy to vote and hard to cheat” and that officials were striving to be more consistent in the law’s application. The office has issued a directive that mistakes in the address and birthdate fields of provisional ballots should not be the sole basis for rejection if a board can still identify the voter.

Chandra and other critics say the Ohio laws are aimed at low-income and minority voters who move more often and have less flexibility with schedules, making them more likely to cast absentee or provisional ballots. They also are more likely to back Democrats.

“It’s a clever scheme to shave off Democratic votes,” said Chandra, arguing the laws create a modern-day literacy test by requiring voters to read, write and understand voting forms without making any errors or leaving out information.

REPUBLICANS DENY RACIAL BIAS

Republican backers of the Ohio law reject the claims of racial or partisan bias.

“It is just nonsense,” said Ohio State Senator Bill Coley, lead sponsor of one of the bills. “We aren’t trying to disallow their ballot, we are trying to make sure that every ballot that is cast was cast by an actual registered voter and you are cutting down on opportunities for shenanigans.”

U.S. Election Assistance Commission records show Democratic-leaning Franklin, the state’s second-largest county, was the most strict in 2014, throwing out 651 ballots for technical errors including missing or incorrect Social Security numbers, zip codes, birthdates, cities or street names.

Officials tossed five ballots because the voter wrote their name in cursive. Another seven were rejected because the voter mixed up two digits of their Social Security number, the federal data showed. Some 256 were rejected because the voter did not provide a birthdate.

“We are not allowed to do anything other than what the law says,” said David Payne, deputy director of the Franklin County Board of Elections. “We can’t be arbitrary.”

In Democratic-leaning Lucas County, the elections board rejected an absentee ballot in 2014 because the street name was misspelled as “Cuthberth” rather than “Cuthbert,” according to evidence presented in the lawsuit.

SMALLER COUNTIES MORE FORGIVING

Many smaller, heavily Republican rural counties did not reject any ballots for those reasons. In Wyandot County, ballots examined for the lawsuit found officials approved ballots without a valid street address, city or zip code, a wrong or missing birthdate, or a misspelled name.

“We’re not monsters. We want to count everybody’s vote,” said Deb Passet, elections director for Wyandot County, a sparsely populated county south of Toledo where Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the vote in 2012.

Election officials in rural, Republican-leaning Adams County are also more likely to forgive voters who make a mistake. “If there is an opening and they can help the voter out, that’s the way they will go,” said Mary Fannin, director of the county’s board of elections.

Other states have tried to introduce similar exact-match information requirements. Georgia and Wisconsin also faced recent challenges that led to adjustments in laws requiring voters to provide letter-perfect personal identification information.

The battle over the Ohio law is just one of several voting rights disputes complicating election forecasts in the state. In the last year, courts have also allowed the state to eliminate a period of early voting, known as Golden Week, when voters could register and cast a ballot on the same trip – a convenience that has been popular with minority voters.

“People should not have to jump through all these hoops to get their votes counted in Ohio,” said Ohio Democratic Rep. Kathleen Clyde.

(Andy Sullivan reported from Washington.; Editing by Jason Szep and Ross Colvin)

IMAGE: Roland Gilbert, a blind 86-year-old Franklin County resident, stands for a portrait at his home in Columbus, Ohio U.S., October 28, 2016. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

Changes To North Carolina Voting Laws Could Put Thousands Of 2016 Ballots At Risk

Changes To North Carolina Voting Laws Could Put Thousands Of 2016 Ballots At Risk

By Julia Harte

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) – On Election Day in 2014, Joetta Teal went to work at a polling station in Lumberton, North Carolina. Like all poll workers, she was required to stay untilvoting booths closed, so she decided to cast her own vote there.

That was a mistake, she later discovered. What she didn’t know was that under a 2013 state law she had to vote in the precinct where she lived. The polling station where she voted was not in her precinct, so her vote was not counted.

A Reuters review of Republican-backed changes to North Carolina’s voting rules indicates as many as 29,000 votes might not be counted in this year’s Nov. 8 presidential election if a federal appeals court upholds the 2013 law. Besides banning voters from voting outside their assigned precinct on Election Day, the law also prevents them from registering the same day they vote during the early voting period.

The U.S. Justice Department says the law was designed to disproportionately affect minority groups, who are more likely to vote out of precinct and use same-day registration. Backers of the law deny this and say it will prevent voter fraud.

The battleground state has a recent history of close races that have hinged on just a few thousand votes. Barack Obama, a Democrat, won North Carolina by just 14,177 votes in 2008. In 2012, Mitt Romney, a Republican, narrowly carried the state by a margin of just 2.04 percent.

Reuters reviewed state election board data showing the number of North Carolinians who made use of out-of-precinct voting and same-day registration in previous elections, including March’s state nominating contest, or primary, when voters nominated their preferred presidential candidate.

The Reuters analysis includes some assumptions. For 29,000 votes to go uncounted on Nov. 8, North Carolinians would need to vote in the same numbers and in the same ways they have in previous elections, including the March primary.

In that primary, after a court temporarily ordered a stay on the bans, 6,387 North Carolinians voted out of their assigned precinct and 22,501 registered the same day they voted.

The North Carolina Board of Elections did not respond to requests for comment on Reuters’ findings.

North Carolina Senator Bob Rucho, a Republican who backed the law, declined to comment specifically on the findings but disputed the notion that the law suppressed votes, saying the increased turnout between the 2010 and 2014 elections shows it has not had a disparate impact on minority voters.

“How can it show voter suppression when more black voters voted and more white voters voted, and there was more opportunity, and there are more black voters registered than there were before?”

Turnout between those elections did rise by 1.8 percentage points for black voters and by 1.1 percentage points for white voters, according to data the state election board entered as evidence in court.

Advocacy group Democracy North Carolina, however, said their poll monitors saw many people attempting to vote out of precinct in 2014 who were told by officials their ballots would not count, and as a result cast no vote. And it says 23,500 voters would have used same-day registration to vote in 2014 if it had not been banned, basing its findings on a review of election board data, hundreds of hotline calls, and the observations of more than 300 poll monitors.

North Carolina Board of Elections executive director Kim Strach said her office looked into claims of voters being turned away “but generally did not find statewide evidence of it.”

LEGAL CHALLENGES

The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is considering legal challenges to the law from the Justice Department and civil rights groups and citizens, is expected to issue a ruling in the next few weeks.

North Carolina’s Senate passed its new voting laws weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 in June 2013 to eliminate a requirement that nine states mostly in the South with a history of discrimination, including North Carolina, receive federal approval before changing election laws.

The Justice Department alleged a “race-based purpose” to the new law in a legal brief. Studies the department cited show that minority and low-income voters are more likely to use same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting because they are less likely to own a car or have flexible working hours. These voters are also more likely to vote for Democratic candidates.

“If you pick out precisely the way minority voters are engaging with the process, that’s intentionally treating minority voters differently,” Justin Levitt, the head of the Justice Department’svoting unit, said in an interview.

North Carolina state officials say the changes cut fraud by making it harder for people to cast multiple ballots or impersonate other voters.  The Justice Department said in court documents that voter fraud was “virtually non-existent” in the state.

Rucho, the state senator, said while the law banned some voting methods and cut the early votingperiod from 17 to 10 days, it extended the hours during which voters could vote.

“We opened up more locations for them to vote, more times to vote, more flexible times,” said Rucho.

FOUR-PERSON TEAM

Teal, who is African American, was one of 14 North Carolina voters Reuters contacted whose votes were invalid in 2014 because of the law.

Ten of them, including Teal, did not realize their votes were not counted until informed by Reuters. One was told his vote would not count by a voter advocacy group, and the other three were told by poll workers that their ballots likely would not count.

In all, 1,390 ballots were rejected in the 2014 election because they were cast out of the voter’s assigned precinct — up from 49 rejected for the same reason in 2010, according to the Reuters review of provisional ballots.

“If they could have just sent people letters and told them exactly where to go, that would have been helpful,” Teal said. The North Carolina Board of Elections website has a tool for residents to look up their assigned precincts, but Teal did not know about it.

This year she plans to vote early.

In other developed democracies, “the government takes a greater responsibility for ensuring that voter registration lists are kept up to date and accurate,” said Tova Wang, senior fellow at the policy research group Demos.

The election board has been trying to educate North Carolinians about the ban on out-of-precinctvoting through ads and a four-person voter outreach team that travels around the state to raise awareness about the changes, said Strach, the board’s director.

“We’re telling people, go find out where you are, make sure you’re showing up at the right precinct,” Strach said.

(Editing by Jason Szep and Ross Colvin)

Photo: An election worker checks a voter’s drivers license as North Carolina’s controversial “Voter ID” law goes into effect for the state’s presidential primary election at a polling place in Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S. on March 15, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Keane/File Photo

Obama Calls For Voting Rights Reform On 50th Anniversary Of Historic Law

Obama Calls For Voting Rights Reform On 50th Anniversary Of Historic Law

President Obama called on Congress to pass “an updated version” of the Voting Rights Act during a speech on Thursday, the 50th anniversary of the passage of the historic federal law. He also urged Americans to exercise their right to vote, citing the forthcoming National Voter Registration Day on September 22.

The White House commemoration of the voting law — which sought to protect the constitutional right to vote from laws created to bar people of color from the polls, such as literacy tests and poll taxes — came a day after a U.S. appeals court ruled that a Texas law requiring voters to show authorized identification violated the Voting Rights Act through its “discriminatory effects.”

The president called on Congress to pass a new version of the Voting Rights Act that would correct some of the recent court rulings and actions by state legislatures that have weakened the enforcement of the original law.

“This has to be a priority. If this isn’t working, then nothing’s working,” Obama said.

“Too many states are making it harder for folks to vote,” the president added, citing how photo ID laws and restrictions on early voting disproportionately affect seniors and poor people.

The Supreme Court struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. After the SCOTUS ruling, then-governor of Texas Rick Perry said in a statement that “Texas may now implement the will of the people without being subject to outdated and unnecessary oversight and the overreach of federal power,” referring to the Voting Rights Act’s overseeing of certain states’ voting laws.

On Thursday, countering what many conservatives call common-sense protections against voter fraud, Obama said voter fraud is too rare a crime to be fairly used as an argument in favor of laws that limit many eligible voters from casting ballots. “There are almost no instances of people going to vote in someone else’s name,” he said. “It’s not a common crime.”

The goal of these voter ID laws, the president stated, is “to make it harder for folks to vote.”

The president on Thursday said Americans should not tolerate laws that aim to disenfranchise their fellow citizens. “How can you rationalize making it harder for people to vote?” Obama said.

“State legislatures are making it deliberately harder for people to vote and some are not shy about saying so,” the president added.

In 2011, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker called a photo ID requirement he was signing into law “obviously special.”

In 1965, a few months after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led thousands from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest legal barriers erected to prevent black people from voting, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law on August 6, 1965.

“The struggle for the right to vote has been a long, tedious struggle for the soul of America,” John Lewis said, adding that the struggle continues today.

Recalling his time as a 25-year-old civil rights activist and witness of the signing of the Voting Rights Act on Capitol Hill, Lewis also spoke of the literacy tests, beating, arrests and even murders of black people attempting to exercise their right to vote.

“All across the American South it was almost impossible for people of color to register to vote,” Lewis said.

Despite the progress, Lewis said there’s a “deliberate, systematic effort” to make it more difficult for people of color, young people, poor people, seniors, and others to participate in the political system.

The president also made clear that low voter turnout rates in the United States are primarily due to citizens choosing not to exercise their right to vote, rather than being prevented from registering.

“Far more people disenfranchise themselves than any law does by not participating, by not getting involved,” Obama said.

Photo: Keith Ivey via Flickr