In Ohio, Voting Down Issue 2 Won’t Be Enough (HB 234 Must Be Repealed to Prevent Future Vote Fraud)

The latest weekly Ohio CPAs’ e-mail tells me that the Legislature and our Governor have virtually abandoned efforts (really, forsaken their respective duties) to ensure the integrity of the voting process, even when Issue 2 is, as expected, rejected by the voters next Tuesday.

Absentee Voting Bill Heads to Taft for Signature

The Ohio General assembly last week passed no-fault absentee voting legislation. Gov. Taft is expected to sign HB 234 into law although the bill will not take effect until after next month’s election.

The legislation is similar to State Issue 2, a proposed constitutional amendment that will appear on the Nov. 8 ballot. Both measures would allow registered voters to vote absentee for any reason up to 35 days prior to an election. However, HB 234 requires absentee voters to provide election officials with some form of identification while Issue 2 has no identification requirement.

While both political parties have stated support of no-fault absentee voting, the hotly debated legislation was passed largely on partisan lines due to the identification requirement. Senate Republicans stated the identification should be required to prevent voter fraud, while Democrats argued the requirement would dissuade some Ohioans from voting.

If approved by voters, Issue 2 would override HB 234.

The identification requirement of HB 234, even for absentees, is only somewhat reassuring, especially since, according to a reliable source I exchanged e-mails with, it does not have to be a photo ID.

The biggest problems with absentee voting, irrespective of the initial ID requirement, are:

• The possibility that the absentee voter might be coerced or under duress when completing their ballot.
• The chance that someone else might obtain or intercept the ballot and complete it for them without their knowledge or consent.
• The chance that mail-in absentee ballots will be mishandled or mismanaged between the time they are received in the mail and tabulated.

Washington state has the most lenient voting standards in the nation. It is no coincidence that a gubernatorial election fiasco of epic proportions occurred there last year, with the above absentee ballot problems and many others to boot. Election officials kept “finding” ballots; nine counties ended up with more votes counted than voters credited with voting; mentally incompetent and deceased persons “voted;” hundreds, if not thousands, of felons illegally voted; and one county (King, the largest) could not explain nearly 4,000 discrepancies between the number of votes counted and earlier tallies of ballots or people recorded as voting at the polls. In June, a full seven months after Election Day, the contest was “decided” by a judge. The “loser,” Dino Rossi, decided not to appeal the judge’s ruling to the state Supreme Court because he felt that its other-party majority would not rule in his favor no matter how strong the actual merits of his case were. Topping it all off, the “winning” party’s Governors Association insulted the intelligence of everyone who followed the election charade by issuing this pack-of-lies announcement.

If what you just read in the previous paragraph doesn’t convince you that choosing the same degree of absentee ballot permissiveness the state of Washington has would be a big mistake, I don’t know what will.

Even the ultraliberal Toledo Blade recognizes that no-excuse-needed absentee balloting is an open invitation to widespread fraud and abuse. In fact, The Blade deserves a great deal of credit for very persuasively articulating the anti-Issue 2 and vote-in-person arguments:

Absentee voting has been long established for one basic reason only - to protect the voting privilege for those citizens who knew in advance that they would be out of their home county on Election Day.

Over the years, of course, it has become something more than that, as Ohioans who don’t wish to be bothered to go to the polls simply fib about their Election Day plans, receive an absentee ballot, and vote early by mail.

Ohio law already makes that easy for them by providing a host of excuses - 16 in all - for voting absentee: military service, health and disability issues, work-related conflicts, and age (62 or older), among them.

Issue 2, in our view, would lead to a troubling extension of that phenomenon.

Something profoundly important is lost when citizens stop voting at the polls. Stepping into the voting booth is a personal and private act, a moment in time when each voter is free to make up his or her own mind without interference from anyone else. All the lobbying, all the campaigning, all the commercials are over. It is time to decide, and nobody else is privy to the decision that is made.

Citizenship should require a certain amount of effort by the citizens who profess to value it. Maybe for some people convenience trumps the overt act of going to the polls, but we would hate to see the precious privacy afforded at the neighborhood precinct diminished further.

Absentee voting, which I believe is already a bit too generous in Ohio, should be limited to situations where the voter either will truly be absent and signs off that such is the case (e.g., someone in out-of-county or overseas military service, on a business trip, etc.), or where the voter will face truly undue hardship if required to visit the polls on Election Day.

Not only should Issue 2 be rejected, but HB 234 should also be repealed well in advance of the state’s 2006 primary. The fact that both parties are so irresponsible about protecting the integrity of Ohio’s elections is a scandal.