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CASE Priorities

CASE is following three basic areas of election concern. The first area is security, the accuracy of the ballot counting process. Errors happen all the time and we want to find the sources of these and try to reduce them. Fraud includes tampering with the process of counting votes to change the outcome. All methods of voting are susceptible to fraud, but electronic counting of ballots is especially worrisome because the fraud can be widespread, have only a slight effect on any one machine, and be very difficult to detect.

The second area of concern is making it relatively easy for every citizan who wants to vote to be able to do so successfully. 


Statement of Concern: Ohio legislators have been steadily and determinedly nipping and cutting at voter's rights since their massive effort failed in 2011 with Ohio Senate Bill 5   Ohio Senate Bill 5  - Wikipedia. With every cut they make, voter turnout is reduced. The new laws are designed to make voting making harder and more expensive. CASE is very concerned that very significant numbers of citizens will find it more and more difficult to get to the polls. Further, the people affected are generally the poor, the very mobile, and the elderly. The term "mobile" is used here to refer principally to college students, it also refers to many poor and to quite a few elderly. Each of these groups especially needs to have their say at the polls. Whenever we think of changes to voting rules and  consider whether they affect us, stop and think in terms of how it would affect you if you had no car, if you were working two jobs, if you had to move frequently and had children or elderly parents to care for.

We present here some of the most important challenges to fair voting in Ohio. Click the items below for details.
Early Absentee Voting
Election Audits
Gerrymandering
Voter ID
Voter Registration
Election Supervision
Right to Vote




Early Absentee Voting

Recommend:
Leave it at 35 days. No Change

Reasoning: Ohio doesn't have actual early voting. The law allows for absentee voting and was previously just for people who were traveling out of the state and could not get to the polls in person. Those people still need a good option; people traveling overseas have 45 days. The law was recently amended to allow people to vote absentee with no justification  (sometimes called no fault) which feels like early voting. The secondary consequence (presumably) of this change was that for the first five days of absentee voting (between 35 to 30 days before the election), voters could register and vote on the same day.

These are important advantages, especially for the young, very busy, and very mobile and we should keep both options.

The latest proposal (H. B. No. 250  As Introduced) to reduce the absentee voting period to just 17 days does not give enough time for out of state travelers. It may seem to give enough time for in-state voters who would prefer to vote early, but the need is to accommodation the hundreds of thousands of citizens (my estimate) whose lives are crammed with caring for children and very often a second job. These people need the early voting days and weekends, especially the three weekends before election day. Extended voting hours during the week would also help. And the Saturday, Sunday, Monday before election day are the most important.

Conclusion: We need numbers from studies to support this position or to change it.

Refs:

PolitiFact Ohio | Teresa Fedor says Republicans supported Ohio's early voting process when it was enacted
Elections bill in Ohio Senate gets caught in partisan crossfire | The Columbus Dispatch
Election 2012: Voting Laws Roundup | Brennan Center for Justice
Reforming Ohio's Democracy -- Ohio Citizen Action  (see for RON amendment)

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Election Audits

Recommend:
Surprise audits across all races and all precincts (at random) conducted transparently by an independent agency and with discrepancies resolved before the election is certified.

Reasoning: When electronic voting was being argued in the Ohio legislature, the issue finally was resolved when both sides agreed to "Trust but Verify." The meaning was clear but never resulted in legislation that would carry out this resolve. So now we have the speed of electronically counted votes but very little assurance that the vote is accurate in spite of so called post election audits. Many have developed statistically significant schemes to audit an election, but such a plan needs to be enforced and must be conducted in time to affect the outcome.

Conclusion: There are several books written about recent election fraud just in Ohio. In these days of billion dollar campaigns, election fraud is not just a possibility, it is a certainty.  But the machine fraud will be just a few votes on each machine and will be accompanied by many other ways to game the election including gerrymandered districts, keeping groups inclined to vote the opposition off the voting rolls, making the lines long in precincts that typically go against the party in power, and by making it expensive and time consuming to vote.

Refs:
Why Audit Election Results? | ElectionAudits.org
Post Election Audits | Verified Voting
Science Policy: Election Auditing Resources

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Gerrymandering

Recommendation:
It is imperative that political districts be drawn by an independent agent that achieves balance in as many districts as possible and also keeps the districts in reasonable shapes that reflect the locality.

Reasoning: This is the biggest problem in our election process today. Parties in power arrange the congressional districts to give the opposition a few precincts by large margins and give themselves many precincts with smaller bur rather safe margins. Both parties do it. The result is that the party in power in the state can win 60 or 70 percent of the precincts while only winning a small plurality of the vote. Or, in a worst case, they can lose the plurality of the vote and still win 55 percent or more of the precincts.

One statistic nation-wide is that in 2012, according to PolitiFact.com,  "Democrats won 50.59 percent of the two-party vote. Still, they won just 46.21 percent of seats..."

Conclusion: Balanced districts will allow each party to be competitive in every race. The result will be that the candidates will have to take somewhat moderate positions instead of letting a small active base that is far right or far left pick the representative for the entire district.

Refs:
Reforming Ohio's Democracy -- Ohio Citizen Action


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Voter ID

Recommendation:  Voter's signature is proper and adequate ID to vote.

Reasoning: 
There is no need for a separate formal ID to vote. Despite the drum beat by the right wing, there is no voter fraud that can not be stopped by existing election practices. In order to vote, a citizen must state a name and address that is in the voter book and then provide a signature that matches the one on file. There are occasional incidences of people voting more than once or from the wrong precinct, but established procedures can catch these individuals and there are adequate penalties to discourage this as a practice to inflate the vote for one side or the other.

Conclusion:
The drive for Voter ID is a classic example of election fraud.  It is a technique to reduct the number of citizens eligible to vote who fit in certain classes that are likely to vote for the left; poor and needing to move frequently.



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Voter Registration

Recommendation: Voter registration is essential, it is also complex and expensive. But it doesn't have to be as hard as we seem to make it. Citizens need to register to vote when they come of age or have not voted for years, or if they have been released from prison. They need to update their registration when they move or change their name. All of these occasions provide ways to automatically offer people a chance to register or update their registration. The only group is those who have not voted in years and have been removed from the voter rolls. Still, we have voter registration drives every election season that find millions who have been lost to they system.

An equally difficult problem is for the people who maintain the voter rolls who need to remove people who have moved or passed away without removing someone by mistake.

Reasoning:
See here for details to be added.   Decreased Voter Registration

Conclusion: Maintaining current and accurate voter rolls is paramount



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Election Supervision

Recommendation: Establish an independent non-partisan agency to oversee elections.

Reasoning: Elections are overseen traditionally by the Secretary of State. But this doesn't make any sense when half the candidates on the ballot are from an opposing party and the Secretary is often on the ballot that he/she is overseeing.



Brennan Center Testimony: Presidential Voting Commission Can Modernize Elections  [html]  [pdf]



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Right to Vote

To start, see  FairVote.org | Right to Vote Amendment



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