Voting should be easier, not harder

Here's something worth celebrating: Ohio is not among 47 states weighing limits on voting rights. Perhaps I shouldn't point it out, given that Republicans control the General Assembly here and that some of them might see the lack of restrictive legislation as an opportunity to introduce a bill or two. Certainly, Republicans across the country, using ex-President Donald Trump's ridiculous claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election as an excuse, have been moving to limit voting. For example, Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, signed that state's Election Integrity Act on March 25, hours after the legislature approved it. Recycling a favorite refrain of Jon Husted, who was Ohio's Republican secretary of state before he became its lieutenant governor, Kemp tweeted recently: "The Peach State is leading the nation in making it easy to vote and hard to cheat." As if cheating were a problem as important to address as expanding access to voting — cheating is all but nonexistent — and not just a handy justification to limit such access. Georgia is among the first states to enact limits and among the first to experience a backlash. On Friday, for example, Major League Baseball said it would move its All-Star Game out of Atlanta this year in protest against the measure. In almost all states, though, legislators have either passed or proposed voting restrictions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which calls itself a nonpartisan law and policy institute and is named in honor of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. "As of March 24," the center reported Thursday, "legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states. That's 108 more (Brennan Center's italics) than the 253 restrictive bills tallied as of February 19, a 43 percent increase in little more than a month." Georgia's lead in this stampede reflects Trump's fixation on it. He tried but failed to get Georgia election officials to "find" enough votes to overturn now-President Joe Biden's victory there in November, and in January, despite Trump's support for the state's two Republican U.S. senators, its voters rejected them in favor of Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. The results marked Georgia's transition from a reliably Republican state to a battleground, in part because its electorate is increasingly diverse. No wonder the results got the attention of the GOP-controlled legislature. Ohio has been experiencing a counter transition: away from bellwether status and toward reliable Republicanism. Ohioans backed Barack Obama, a Democrat, by less than 5 percentage points in 2008 and less than 3 percentage points in 2012 over the Republican presidential nominee, first John McCain, then Mitt Romney, but they twice voted for Trump, in 2016 and 2020, by more than 8 percentage points. Republicans also control all three branches of state government. Thus, they have less incentive to change the rules for elections than, say, Georgia's Republicans. Here's one example of the contrast between the two states, based on an analysis The New York Times published Friday online identifying 16 key provisions of Georgia's new law that will limit ballot access and email exchanges I had last week with Paul Adams, a Democrat who is director of Lorain County's Board of Elections: Georgia's new law prohibits state and local elections officials from sending out unsolicited applications for absentee ballots, which its secretary of state did before its primary election in June, leading to record absentee voting in the state. Before the general election, several local governments, primarily in urban areas, sent out unsolicited applications. Ohio law, on the other hand, permits its secretary of state to blanket registered voters with request forms for absentee ballots before even-year general elections, provided the legislature appropriates the funds necessary to do so. Secretary of State Frank LaRose mailed such forms before the 2020 general election. Ironically, a bill that moved Ohio's presidential primary to April from March, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, specifically prohibited LaRose from mailing out unsolicited absentee ballot applications, which Adams said dismayed local elections officials. Instead, LaRose's office sent out cards explaining how to apply for an absentee ballot. "Boards of Elections were inundated with calls for requests because of the cards," Adams wrote. The glut was evidence not just of voters' eagerness to escape infection from COVID-19 but also of their intense interest in the election. That interest existed nationwide and resulted in extraordinary turnout in November, especially in states where the vote was conducted entirely or mostly by mail, according to an analysis from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Such participation, particularly because it happened with no credible evidence of fraud, ought to be celebrated, not tamped down going forward with legislation such as that Georgia approved and so many other states are weighing. Ohio is an outlier in that regard, and it ought to stay there. Andy Young is editor emeritus of The Chronicle-Telegram. Contact him at (440) 329-7111 or ayoung@chroniclet.com.