Election Dirty Tricks: Ohio Falsely Notifies Voters That They Are Unregistered

Thousands of Ohio voters have been falsely notified that they are not registered to vote due to a database error in Ohio’s voter rolls. An Ohio voter advocacy group alertedOhio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) to this major system problem on October 30. But instead of fixing it, Husted issued a directive instructing local boards to use the same flawed search method to count provisional ballots after Election Day.

Ohio’s computer search of the voter registration database will only find exact matches, meaning that voters could come up as unregistered due to typos, abbreviations, or partial entries. This flawed search mechanism missed huge numbers of registered voters in Franklin and Cuyahoga Counties, incorrectly rejecting 33,000 requests for absentee ballots. These two counties corrected the error, but thousands of others may have slipped through the cracks in the rest of the state. These voters were told they are not registered to vote and may be forced to use provisional ballots at the polls. READMORE