Allow more drop boxes for ballots

For a man charged with running Ohio's elections smoothly, Frank LaRose is strangely eager to limit a practice that could help absentee voters. LaRose, a Republican who is Ohio's secretary of state, issued an ill-advised directive Friday reimposing a rule limiting county boards of elections to a single ballot drop box. The usefulness of drop boxes for absentee ballots became clear during the 2020 election cycle, when the pandemic made in-person voting more challenging and mail slowed to a crawl thanks to the efforts of U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Although LaRose insisted that drop boxes made sense, he also pushed back against allowing counties to deploy more than one. Cuyahoga County, for instance, wanted to place drop boxes at six libraries. Nope, said LaRose, and promptly got into a legal tussle over the issue. He insisted that state law allowed only a single drop box per county. Although he said he favored allowing more drop boxes, he claimed his hands were tied. Courts allowed his decision to stand, but they also rejected his argument that he lacked the authority to allow more. The result was predictable: long lines of cars as voters swarmed to lone drop boxes to deliver their ballots. After a contractor's snafu delayed the mailing of absentee ballots, traffic got crazy once voters actually received them, Lorain County Board of Elections Director Paul Adams told us Monday. It was so bad, he said, that his office needed help from county sheriff's deputies and the Ohio Department of Transportation to manage the traffic flow, a problem compounded by drivers arriving for early in-person voting. It reached the point, Adams said, that he and other employees at the elections board office parked at nearby businesses to reserve the office lot for voters. But for LaRose's intransigence, Adams said, the board might have considered adding boxes, although they were in short supply. Yes, voters could use the U.S. Postal Service, but mail continues to move at, well, a snail's pace. In December, the Postal Service's Northern Ohio District had the nation's third-worst record for on-time deliveries of single piece, first-class mail. So much for confidence that ballots, bills or boxes will arrive on time. Although many of those who cast absentee ballots in 2020 will return to the polls once the pandemic is brought under control, others found that they liked the ease of voting early. LaRose argued that a single drop box promoted "uniformity" in administering elections, but different counties have different issues. Cuyahoga County, for instance, has more than 1.2 million residents. Ohio's smallest county, Vinton in southeast Ohio, has 13,085, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A LaRose spokeswoman said his new directive on drop boxes was designed to keep things as they are until the General Assembly can address the issue. Given how slowly bills move through Columbus, a legislative fix could take years. Voting tends to drop significantly in off-year elections, which might suggest there's no harm in retaining the limit until legislators can address it. As Adams correctly noted, though, off-year elections are the best time to change voting rules because the bugs can be worked out before voter turnout surges again in gubernatorial or presidential election years. In his directive, LaRose quoted a court decision that described Ohio law as "generous when it comes to absentee voting." There's no good reason it can't be more generous.