Secretary of State Frank LaRose's office acknowledged 'growing pains' and said it's reviewing the election results for suggestions.
Early voting for the August 8 election began Tuesday morning, July 11, 2023, at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections office in Downtown Cleveland. A voter casts their ballot. David Petkiewicz, cleveland.comCOLUMBUS, Ohio — Elections officials and voter advocates say new voting rules Republican state lawmakers passed late last year led to more rejected ballots in the first statewide test of those changes during the August special election.
“We all understand the intent of the law is to identify the person,” Ockerman said. “And we have to make sure if we can successfully identify that person, that their vote should count. How we actually do that I think though, we have to look at the data and see what the solutions might be.” In addition, the bill cut the amount of time, from seven days to four days, that a voter could travel to their county elections office to provide additional information to help prove their identity after casting a provisional ballot, a type of ballot voters must cast if their eligibility is in question on Election Day. And voters who cast provisional ballots can no longer simply provide the last four digits of their Social Security number to help prove their identity.
It isn’t precisely clear why the growing number of provisional ballots came with an accompanying increase in the proportion of rejections. But barring voters from using their driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers to help prove their identity, and giving them less time to sort out problems, could help explain it.
Paul Adams, Lorain County’s elections director, said around one-third of the 121 voters whose IDs had expired were age 65 or older. Seventeen ballots were from registered Democrats, 26 were from registered Republicans and 78 were from unaffiliated voters. In Cuyahoga County, 136 voters’ provisional ballots were rejected for lacking proper identification, up from just 24 whose ballots were rejected for that reason during the November 2022 election, according to Tony Perlatti, director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.
For the August election, voters failed to return 38,350 of the 237,469 absentee ballots they had requested, meaning that 13.9% of ballots were unreturned, according to state data as of Aug. 12, four days after the election. This compares to the November 2022 election, when just 7.7% of requested mailed ballots went unreturned.
Some poll workers also failed to tell voters they could cast a provisional ballot if they lacked valid ID, Hapasha said. Even under HB458, that voter could have gone to their county Bureau of Motor Vehicles, gotten a temporary ID and brought that to their county elections office in time for their vote to count, although they had three fewer days to do so under the new law because of the reduction in the post-Election Day provisional ballot deadline.
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