Bigger state role can better protect voter registration

Voting advocates were right to raise concerns about how voter rolls are maintained in Ohio and The Dispatch takes pride in the role our journalists played in uncovering mistakes in the process. Going forward, Ohio Secretary of State Frank Larose appears committed to improving the process and we urge state lawmakers to help make it happen.

The key likely lies in giving the state more control over maintaining voter rolls but not sacrificing the decentralized running of actual elections. An Ohio election, especially a statewide one, would be tough for a partisan to buy or steal, because votes are counted separately in 88 counties by local boards made up of two members of each political party, with different parties dominant in different counties. That shouldn’t change.

Keeping registrations up to date, however, is another matter.

Critics, chiefly Democrats, long have claimed that Republican secretaries of state have been too quick to purge the registrations of inactive voters, thus suppressing the vote especially among minorities, and poor and young adults. In fact, the same “supplemental process” has been followed by secretaries of state both Republican and Democrat for decades.

But it has not been error-free. Each of the county boards of election compiles all the registrations of people who have skipped the past three federal (even-numberedyear) elections and who did not respond to a notice (sent after the first missed federal election) asking whether they’d moved.

Just how imperfect that is was revealed after Larose took office in January 2019 and, in advance of a purge planned for the following September, directed the counties to first send him their lists of registrations to be canceled. He combined them into a statewide list and made it available to the public.

A number of interested groups analyzed the list; The Dispatch found more than 1,600 names statewide that shouldn’t have been targeted for cancellation. Franklin County officials found another 1,100 locally who should have been considered updated because they had signed ballot petitions.

Some of the mistakes were made by the vendors who supplied counties with software for the process; others were human error. All told, the counties use four different systems for registration, and the state has no standards for them nor a process to certify that they’re reliable.

Larose has proposed that lawmakers change that with a new law that would rename the current Board of Voting Machine Examiners, which certifies voting machines, and broaden its mandate to cover voting systems, including for registration. It has passed the Senate and deserves passage in the House as well.

Voter registration these days relies on sophisticated software and county elections departments vary greatly in size and capacity. State-level guidance would ensure all are using reliable systems that work together.

Senate Bill 186, also backed by Larose, would keep voter rolls much more up to date by providing a near-automatic chance to register or update to every Ohioan who does business at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

Shifting voter-registration responsibility fully from the counties to the state will take time and a lot of political persuasion. In the meantime, Senate Bills 194 and 186 offer tools to reduce errors in the process. We would love to hear partisans argue less about that process and more about the best policies to move Ohio forward.