County awaits directions on voter rolls
The U.S. Supreme Court decision last week upholding the method by which Ohio purges its voter lists has had little immediate effect on the way the Washington County Board of Elections manages its rolls, the county registrar said.
Mandy Amos said the county until 2015 purged its voter registration rolls every two years, in odd-numbered years, removing the names of people who had not voted in the most recent presidential election and had not responded to mailed notices. Generally, inactive voters in Ohio who haven’t responded to warnings mailed to the most recent address the registrar has on file are removed from the rolls after six years.
Amos said the county stopped purging the rolls when the state was sued successfully in 2016. However, the district court decision was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and reversed, meaning the process used by Ohio, said to be the most aggressive in the country, could continue.
“We won’t purge anyone until we get guidance from the (Ohio) Secretary of State,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll purge anybody until next year.”
Amos said anyone whose registration is canceled has the option of casting a provisional ballot, which has to be validated by a committee. In the May primary election, she said, two provisional ballots were cast out of a total of 10,776.
Voter data is kept using a software system, called Triad, that tracks activity and keeps records, she said.
“They have it set up so it’s easy,” she said. “It keeps all the dates in there, tracks the last activity and keeps all those records for us. It’s not hard to look that information up.”
Willa O’Neill, chair for the Washington County Democratic Party, said she wasn’t surprised by the Supreme Court decision – a 5-4 ruling, with dissenting justices saying the system disproportionately affects minority voters and amounts to removal for failing to vote, which is prohibited by federal statute. The majority opinion was that the use of mailed notices skirts that provision, making it legal.
“My concern is that we should be making it easier for people to vote,” O’Neill said. “Too few people utilize the right to vote already. I don’t know exactly what can be done to impress on people the importance of voting. I think it would help to bring back civics class in high school.
“I just think that rather than discouraging or making it harder, we should figure out a way to encourage people to go to the polls and take part in government.”
Mike Webber, chair of the county Republican Party, said he didn’t think the decision would have a negative effect on voting, but added, “I don’t have the perspective from, say, Cleveland.” Webber said the situation might be different in large urban areas.
He noted that it’s important for political candidates and ballot proposition advocates to have accurate lists of voters. He and O’Neill were co-chairs of the bipartisan effort behind a successful foster care levy in May.
The committee used voter lists to send out targeted mailings, he said.
“We still got a lot of those back,” he said, which indicates some of the addresses on list are outdated.
“I think our perspective from campaigns is that it helps us to be able to target people who are actually in the precincts,” he said.
Webber said election officials need a method of keeping the voter lists up to date, and the Ohio method seems to work.
“For folks opposed to cleaning up the rolls the way Ohio does, I’d invite them to give us a better solution,” he said.
The last time the Washington County voter list was purged, in 2015, a total of 2,848 names were removed, Melissa Saltzwedel at the board of elections office said, but some of those re-registered. Deputy registrar Peggy Byers said that as a result of the lawsuit filed in Ohio in 2015, registrars were instructed to count votes by anyone who whose name had been struck from the list in the 2011, 2013 and 2015 purges.
At a glance
Washington County voter registration
¯ Population: 60,418.
¯ Voting age population: 48,455.
¯ Number of registered voters: 43,042 (May 8 primary election).
¯ Provisional ballots cast in May primary election: 2.
¯ Percentage of registered voters who participated in the May primary: 25.04 percent.
Source: Census population survey 2017, Washington County Board of Elections.