The GOP wants to make voting harder in Ohio

Ohio Republicans are fond of saying that it's easy to vote, but hard to cheat in the Buckeye state. Turns out they think voting is a little too easy. Thus state Reps. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, and Sharon Ray, R-Wadsworth, while dutifully ignoring the rarity of cheating, aim to make voting harder. They have introduced a bill that follows in the footsteps of other restrictions on voting that Republicans have been busily introducing in statehouses around the country. The ostensible justification for these measures is to protect the "integrity" of elections, even though the 2020 presidential election was the most secure in the nation's history. Nor is there any evidence to support former President Donald Trump's ridiculous claim that widespread fraud cost him reelection. Republicans could have examined what made Trump such a flawed candidate and adjusted their message to appeal to a wider swath of voters. Instead, they've decided that the best way to win elections is to make voting more difficult. The Ohio bill doesn't contain some of the absurd changes favored by Republican legislators elsewhere, such as Georgia's threat of criminal charges for offering food and water to voters waiting in line, but its goal is clear. For instance, the bill would eliminate early voting the Monday before Election Day, which Seitz and Ray insisted local elections officials wanted to give them more time to set up polling places. They obviously didn't talk to Lorain County Board of Elections Director Paul Adams, a Democrat who opposed the move. He told us that running absentee voting until 2 p.m. the day before the election didn't impede setup. "Is it stressful?" he said. "Yes, but it's our job to do that." Exactly. The goal should be to get as many people to vote as possible. It's a better reflection of the will of the people and thus better for democracy. The bill also would limit drop boxes. Adams said Lorain County didn't have a drop box until last year, but it proved popular with voters because of the pandemic, coupled with delivery delays plaguing the U.S. Postal Service. Yet the bill would limit the number of drop boxes to three, which doesn't sound too bad, except that all of them would have to located at a county's elections board office under 24-hour video surveillance. While the limit might not be an issue in smaller counties, it would hamper larger ones. During the presidential election cars were backed up onto Interstate 90 in Cuyahoga County. There are plenty of other secure locations in larger counties that could host drop boxes. Think libraries, police stations or government offices. The use of drop boxes also would be limited to the 10 days before an election rather than Ohio's full 28-day early voting period. That makes no sense unless the idea is to frustrate voters so that they give up trying to drop off ballots when they see the snarl of traffic they'd have to sit through. The bill also would require absentee ballot requests to be made 10 days before an election. Under current law, voters can request absentee ballots until noon the Saturday beforehand. Adams conceded that cut it a bit too close. Even first-class mail can take up to five days to deliver, according to the Postal Service. If the window must be tightened, then it would be better to shoot for five to seven days. The bill also would make it harder to "cure" certain mistakes voters make when they return their absentee ballots, which, again, serves no other purpose than to avoid counting votes. In fairness, the bill has a few fig leaves that appear designed to appeal to voting-rights advocates, such as allowing digital utility bills to be used as identification, letting 17-year-olds serve as election workers and making it slightly harder to purge inactive voters. None of these things, however, change the bill's overall thrust: to make voting harder in Ohio. Worse, Seitz told the Statehouse News Bureau that Senate Republicans could go even further by proposing to reduce or eliminate no-excuse absentee voting. Trump might have won Ohio by 8 percentage points, but Republican lawmakers apparently aren't taking any chances.