The following articlewas originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
It’s been about a year since Ohio’s photo voter ID law took effect, and the organization All Voting Is Local wanted to see how its requirements have impacted provisional voting. What it found was a sharp increase in rejections due to lack of ID. Compared to recent years, the share rejected over identification more than tripled.
What’s a provisional ballot?
Sometimes a voter hits a snag when they show up to cast their ballot. Maybe they forgot an ID or they’ve moved and haven’t updated their registration. Maybe they showed up at the wrong precinct or polling location. When that happens, a voter casts a provisional ballot. It’s a kind of wait-and-see ballot. The voter gets to record their choices, but election officials set the ballot aside and don’t count it until the voter can verify their eligibility.
Even before Ohio’s photo voter ID law, known as HB 458, came into being, voters had to prove their identity to vote. Under prior law they had more flexibility — a utility bill or a bank statement, among other documents, was enough to establish their identity and residence. Now, voters need an unexpired photo ID issued by Ohio, a passport or a military ID.
“There’s a narrative that everybody has identification and it’s not true.” All Voting Is Local Ohio State Director Kayla Griffin said.
In a bid to get IDs to people who don’t have them, HB 458 directs the BMV provide state ID cards to voters who need one free of charge.
The legislation took effect April 7, 2023, and the BMV was ready to hit the ground running. But despite the initiative, registrars around the state actually issued fewer state IDs in 2023 than in the prior two years.
Last year saw slightly more than 396,000 state IDs issued, while 2022 and 2021 both surpassed 420,000.
And even with the free ID program, meant to act as a backstop, Griffin’s team saw a surge in provisional ballots rejected for lack of identification.
What they found
The All Voting Is Local analysis looked at provisional voting in November elections going back to 2018, and then calculated what percentage of rejected ballots were denied over lack of ID. Between 2018 and 2022, the ID rejection rate bounced between 5% and about 9%. But in November of 2023, that figure jumped to more than 28%.
“And it’s not just people in our big Cs,” Griffin said “what we saw from the numbers that’s provided right on the Secretary of State’s website is that there are folks all throughout our state who are impacted by this, and we really should be giving it a second look.”
The report highlighted Muskingum County about an hour east of Columbus. In the 2023 General Election, officials there tallied 242 provisional ballots and rejected 28 — nearly all of them for lack of ID.
In addition to a narrower menu of eligible forms of ID, Griffin noted voters have less time to “cure” their provisional ballot. Before HB 458’s passage voters had seven days to prove their eligibility at the board of elections. Now they have just four.
She described working with a woman whose mother no longer had a driver’s license because she lives in a nursing home. Griffin worked with the daughter to figure out how she could get her mother a new ID and then get her to the board to cure her ballot.
“The daughter, who works two jobs, was like I just cannot — she couldn’t pull it off, right?” Griffin explained. “It was too much of a barrier.”
One of the things Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose likes to highlight is the surprising prevalence of tie votes. When he brings it up, he often does so in the context of fighting voter fraud. Griffin wants to see the same urgency for counting the votes of people who didn’t have the right ID or weren’t able to get to their county elections board to cure their ballot.
“These are voters who showed up to vote on Election Day intending a cast a ballot, but for whatever reason did not know that they needed this form of identification and (were) not able to cure their ballot in the shortened time that we have.”
What to do
While 2023 saw unusually higher voter turnout because of a pair of highly motivating ballot measures, the 2024 presidential election will push turnout far higher. All Voting Is Local worries with the current restrictions in place, a substantial share of Ohioans could find it harder to vote, or to ensure their vote is counted if they have to vote provisionally.
Griffin says she’d love to see Ohio move to same day voting registration — an idea LaRose has blasted as “a direct assault on the integrity of our voting process” — but she acknowledges that’s not likely to happen before November. Twenty-two states and Washington D.C. currently offer some form of same-day voter registration. A group trying to get the idea on Ohio’s ballot has been repeatedly stymied by Attorney General Dave Yost, and they’re currently suing the AG in the Supreme Court of Ohio.
But barring some monumental — and unlikely — change to Ohio’s voter ID provisions, Griffin argued lawmakers need to do more to educate voters about the still relatively new requirements. She explained that could be as simple as a mailer reminding voters about what they’ll need at the polls.
“At least, at minimum,” Griffin said, “give some money to the counties so that they can do outreach and let people know.”
