COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The clock was ticking for Jen Miller.The state of Ohio had released names of 235,000 voters it planned to purge from voter rolls in September.Miller, director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, believed thousands of voters were about to be wrongly removed.Over the summer, the Ohio
The state of Ohio had released names of 235,000 voters it planned to purge from voter rolls in September.
She went online and discovered that her name had also been flagged as an inactive voter. The state was in the process of removing her from its voter rolls. This year, a group of elected officials in the state, mostly all moderate Republicans, tried to answer the concerns with an experiment of their own: Rather than purge the voter rolls behind closed doors as had been done in the past, the government released the full list of those to be removed this summer, and gave the list to advocacy groups. The groups said they found the list was riddled with errors.
In one case, a data mistake from an outside firm meant a large number of people’s names were set to be knocked off. Ohio’s 88 counties each used a different process of removing people from the rolls, an immediate source of headaches for officials trying to compile a statewide list. How Tingley-Hock, a volunteer who doesn’t work for the government, chanced upon such a big mistake shows the kind of unusual backstop the state now depends on to carry out its work correctly.
When LaRose’s office released the spreadsheet with the list about of 235,000 names to be purged, Tingley-Hock ran them through his own database and found thousands of names matching active voters.
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