Federal court allows Ohio to throw out ballots with typos and small errors
If a voter’s signature looks slightly different from the one the state has on file, the vote can be invalidated.
In the span of just two days, they have lost a full week of early voting and their only chance of same-day registration, and hundreds of thousands of still-eligible voters were denied absentee ballot applications. A third blow fell Tuesday afternoon, when a panel of judges from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a law that allows the state to throw out absentee and provisional ballots that have errors as small as leaving out one’s middle name or zip code.
The two judges who ruled to uphold the law are white and were appointed by Republican presidents. The judge who dissented is African American and was appointed by Jimmy Carter, and he blasted his colleagues for backing a policy that “dishonored the struggle for the right of the most vulnerable to vote.”
“I am deeply saddened and distraught by the court’s deliberate decision to reverse the progress of history,” Judge Damon Keith said in his blistering dissent. “The unfettered right to vote is the bedrock of a free and democratic society — without it, such a society cannot stand.”
Keith accused his colleagues of ignoring the factual findings of the lower district court, including that “minorities use provisional ballots more often than whites, and in presidential election years, the absentee ballots and provisional ballots of minority voters are more likely to be rejected than those of white voters.”
https://thinkprogress.org/federal-court-allows-ohio-to-throw-out-ballots-with-typos-and-small-errors-57d3ec60c5cd#.3jtp1jl6x
I hope to hear from Ohio representatives on this development. There should be a full out voter education drive and GOTV effort that informs vulnerable populations about this.
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