Voter photo ID requirement proves to be a problem

A requirement that voters present a valid photo ID when they show up at the polls is unfortunately working exactly as the Republicans who passed it last year intended. The Lorain County Board of Elections on Wednesday discarded the provisional ballots of 160 voters because 39 didn't have a photo ID and 121 had expired IDs when they showed up to vote in the special election Aug. 8. "That makes me very uncomfortable," Democratic board member Anthony Giardini said. "These people weren't cheating." Board President Marilyn Jacobcik, a Republican, agreed, saying, "I think we all share that concern." The board's other Democratic member, Inez James, called it "voter suppression." Some might argue that James went too far with her comment, but the reality is that the ballots of voters who were otherwise "perfectly qualified," as Giardini put it, weren't counted. Of the 302 provisional ballots the board rejected, just under 53 percent were rejected because of ID problems. The other 142 provisional ballots were rejected for other reasons, including 101 that were submitted by people who weren't registered to vote in Ohio. Unregistered people accounted for around 33.4 percent of the rejections. Those ballots shouldn't have been counted, but their rejection showed that the system works. Compare the share of ballots rejected for ID issues earlier this month — again, it was just shy of 53 percent — or the share rejected for similar reasons in May, about 55.6 percent, with the figure from November, before the new rules took effect and voters could still use utility bills and other documentation to prove who they were. In November, the elections board rejected 17 ballots because of ID problems. That was about 7.9 percent of the rejected ballots. In other words, the new law has led to more voters having their ballots turned away because they lacked sufficient ID. The demand for photo IDs at the polls is part of the right's ongoing freak-out about voter fraud, which is vanishingly rare in Ohio and beyond, whatever former President Donald Trump and his acolytes might claim. (Losing an election, as Trump did in 2020, is not proof of fraud.) Some might argue that tossing a hundred or so votes in the name of election security is worth it, but, again, there's no evidence that the voters who lacked proper ID weren't who they claimed they were. Another possible argument is that not counting those votes wouldn't have changed the outcome of the special election, which centered on a GOP-backed proposed constitutional amendment that would have made changing the Ohio Constitution harder. Roughly 62.8 percent of voters in the county rejected Issue 1 as did around 57 percent of voters statewide. True, adding 160 more votes wouldn't have made much of a difference in this election, but some elections are tight. For example, Republican Jeff Riddell defeated then-county Commissioner Matt Lundy, a Democrat, by just 136 votes in November. The 17 votes rejected in that election because of identification problems wouldn't have been enough to sway the outcome, but 160 votes might have. Nor does it appear that only voters from one party or the other were rejected because of identification issues. Election board Director Paul Adams, a Democrat, told us that although he didn't have a party breakdown of voters who were rejected for that reason in August and May, they included Democrats, Republicans and independents. He also told us that the voters whose ballots were rejected because of ID problems varied widely in age. Some might not have gotten around to getting a driver's license or might have lacked a U.S. passport. Others might no longer drive and might have neglected to get a state ID to replace their expired license. Perhaps they simply hadn't had the time to swing by an Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles office to get the proper ID. None of which means their votes shouldn't count. The elections board members intended to draft a letter to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who oversees elections and supports photo ID requirements, expressing their bipartisan concerns. Although LaRose loves to say that in Ohio "it's easy to vote and hard to cheat," he's been drifting ever closer to the wing of his party that acts as if elections are under constant threat of fraud as he runs for the U.S. Senate in the Republican primary next year. That's disappointing because as Ohio's chief elections official, LaRose should be championing greater access to the polls, not supporting policies that diminish it. The elections board has correctly identified a big problem with the state's new voter ID law, but sadly the members probably shouldn't count on LaRose or Republican lawmakers to fix it. Making it harder to vote was the whole point.