David Rosenfeld, Miller-McCune, September 5, 2008 www.Truthout.org
Warning for College Student Voters
Elizabeth Redden, September 3, 2008, www.insidehighered.com
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Nearly 600,000 Subject to Possible Caging in Ohio
David Rosenfeld, Miller-McCune, September 5, 2008 www.Truthout.org
Vote caging suspected in Ohio. (Photo: Matt Mahurin / Rolling Stone)
How many voter-registration mass mailers are "returned to sender" in the run-up to Election Day may determine how many Ohio residents are eligible to vote.
Ohio election officials are sending out a mass mailer stamped "do not forward" to all registered voters today (Sept. 5) with an absentee ballot application and other important notices for Nov. 4.
What's important here is not so much what's going out as what's being returned to sender.
Unbeknownst to the would-be recipients, the same mailer - just 60 days before the election - has the potential to determine their eligibility to vote, challenged not by election officials but by partisan opposition.
A similar mailer in March netted nondeliverable mail from almost 600,000 registered voters in just five Ohio counties who could now have their ballots thrown out for voting under the wrong address.
The National Voter Registration Act prohibits any state from purging names from the voting rolls within 90 days of an election.
The law doesn't, however, preclude mass partisan challenges on or shortly before Election Day - known as voter caging - based on the same returned envelopes from state-sponsored mailers like the ones in Ohio and others going out across the country.
In 2004, the year the national election hinged on results from Ohio, the Ohio Republican Party challenged 35,000 voters based on returned mail from the GOP's own friendly reminder notices. From 2004 to 2006, Republicans challenged 77,000 voters this way nationwide. A consent decree issued in 1982 and amended in 1987 enjoins the GOP from instituting "ballot security programs" that focus on minority voters.
No evidence so far suggests Republicans - vote caging is essentially a GOP sport - have mounted a caging campaign this year. Yet, in July, Franklin County Election Director and County GOP Chairman Doug Preisse told reporters he didn't rule out challenges before November, particularly because of increased home foreclosures, which would make failures to change address on voter registration records more common.
A challenged voter will likely cast a provisional ballot, which often requires voters to return to election divisions to prove their identity and address. Nearly a third of all 1.6 million provisional ballots cast in 2004 were thrown out.
Voting-rights groups don't oppose voter-roll housekeeping, but they cite the federal law as evidence that executing it so close to the actual election isn't fair.
The fraud that voter caging purportedly roots out is relatively rare, although vote solicitors working for the liberal group ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, in 2004 and again this year were accused of submitting false registration forms. Ohio is one of five states where ACORN employees have been investigated and, in some instances, jailed over submitting false voter registration forms.
Unrelated to ACORN, the Web site GOP.com cites two voting-fraud court cases in Ohio, both focused on individuals casting a second ballot intentionally.
On Nov. 1, 2004, voter-rights groups reacted and challenged the partisan caging in Ohio all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in just two days but lost in a final-hour appeal. This year, they want to be as proactive as possible, said Donita Judge, Ohio staff attorney for the nonprofit Advancement Project.
"A single returned piece of mail is not a reliable basis for challenging the right to vote," Judge said. "Mail may be returned for many reasons, including errors in the database from which the mailing is derived, errors in the mailing labels, failure to include an apartment number or poor matching criteria."
Since 2005, Ohio state law has required a non-forwarded mailer 60 days before each federal election. The suspicious part about the law, Judge said, is that it's set to expire after the November election.
But it's not all about throwing votes out. Another aspect of Ohio's reformed election law is that it opens a window between Sept. 30 and Oct. 6 when voters can register one minute and cast a ballot the next.
That's generally seen as a benefit for Democrats this year since the new registrations refer mainly to 400,000 or so resident college students in Ohio. Obama holds a 2-to-1 lead over McCain among 18- to 34-year-olds, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released last month.
Following a statewide mailer similar to the one going out today, before the Ohio primary in March, the Advancement Project obtained the lists of returned notices through simple public records requests. The organization requested records from five urban Ohio counties - Cuyahoga, Franklin, Hamilton, Lucas and Summit.
The total came to 600,000 names out of 3 million voters, amounting to 19.7 percent of all registered voters.
Sally Krisel, director of the Hamilton County Board of Elections, said the high percentage was misleading because the mailer in her county included those on the inactive voter roll. Considering only active registered voters, the county received about 5 percent returned in March, she said.
Inactive voters, tagged for possible removal, are given two years to cast a ballot before they can be removed from the rolls. None of the returned, 60-day notices are used for that purpose, Krisel said.
"We have not purged anybody this year," she said. "In big counties, we're often carrying a lot of inactive voters."
In Franklin County, the March mailer went to all registered voters as well. Out of 780,000, more than 150,000 notices were returned. Those voters are now excluded from receiving another notice this week, said Ben Piscitelli, spokesman for the Franklin County Board of Elections. The only public records request for the list so far came from the Obama campaign, Piscitelli said.
Meanwhile, the sweeping Ohio election law loosens the rules around challenging voters. It also strips much of the ability of voters to know they are being challenged and defend their right to vote before an election judge
Warning for College Student Voters
Elizabeth Redden, September 3, 2008, www.insidehighered.com
©istockphoto/Mika Makelainen
Last week, Virginia’s Montgomery County, home to Virginia Tech, issued a press release regarding proper protocol for college students registering to vote. In interviews with Inside Higher Ed Tuesday, it was described by turns as “unsubstantiated,” “chilling,” and (more generously) as not “incredibly encouraging or friendly.”
It reads, in part: “The Code of Virginia states that a student must declare a legal residence in order to register. A legal residence can be either a student’s permanent address from home or their current college residence. By making Montgomery County your permanent residence, you have declared your independence from your parents and can no longer be claimed as a dependent on their income tax filings — check with your tax professional. If you have a scholarship attached to your former residence, you could lose this funding. And, if you change your registration to Montgomery County, Virginia Code requires you to change your driver’s license and car registration to your present address within 30 days.”
The county registrar of elections said Tuesday that the memo was intended to counteract the absence of cautionary information given to students signed up through the ubiquitous get-out-the-vote registration drives. Generally speaking, however, those interviewed for this article said the warnings are, at worst, farfetched and misleading, or, at best, overstated and not typically supported in reality.
And, in a year in which historic youth voter turnout is anticipated, and the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has been propelled by college students’ support, this case in the battleground state of Virginia is “not an isolated incident,” said Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director for the Student Public Interest Research Group’s nonpartisan New Voters Project.
“For a county registrar to issue what really are in our experience unsubstantiated warnings for a particular demographic is alarming,” said Jahagirdar. “It’s upsetting that this is coming up in Virginia. But it’s even more upsetting that the ability of young people to vote is questioned in many other states too.”
She added: “In 25 years of registering young voters around the country, none of the staff has ever heard of a single incident where a student has lost their tax status or their scholarship because of where they’ve registered to vote.”
Meanwhile, Obama’s campaign, which has been registering voters on Virginia Tech’s campus, has called the information propagated by the county “erroneous.” The campaign’s Virginia spokesman, Kevin Griffis, cited an exemption in the U.S. tax code allowing dependents to live away from home while attending school.
And he said that while students should check with their individual health insurers, in the campaign’s calls to 10 top health insurance companies, none indicated that registering to vote at a college address would be grounds for dismissing students from coverage, “and in fact some of them laughed at us.” (In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Lynne High, a spokeswoman for the mammoth United Healthcare, echoed that students covered on their parents’ health insurance plans aren’t affected if they register to vote in another state.)
“We should be trying to engage as many people as possible in the political process, and have them take part in the civic life of their communities. In the case of students at Virginia Tech, their community is Blacksburg. That’s where they live; that’s where they call home. They should be able to vote there,” Griffis said. (The campaign of the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, did not return a call to its Virginia state office Tuesday.)
On Information
Montgomery County followed up its first dispatch with a somewhat more neutrally worded news release two days later, on August 27. This one raised similar issues but in the form of questions, which students were prompted to consider in deciding whether to register to vote where their family lives or where their college is.
Among them: “Are you claimed as a dependent on your parents’ income tax return? If you are, then their address is probably your legal residence.... Do you have a scholarship that would be affected if you changed your legal residence?.. Would your health, automobile or other insurance coverage be affected by a change in your legal residence? If you are covered under your parents’ insurance policy, your protection could be affected by a change in your legal residence.”
The language in the county’s second release was taken from the Virginia State Board of Elections’ Web site, which in itself is discouraging, said Jon Greenbaum, director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, in Washington. “If you were to look at this as a student, the suggestion that the State Board of Elections is giving you is, ‘You probably should not register to vote here. Don’t register to vote here.’ We think that’s the wrong message to be sending.”
In an interview, E. Randall Wertz, the general registrar of elections for Montgomery County, cited the State Board of Election’s guidance on college student registration as what he relied upon. He explained that, in sending the memo, he was attempting to combat either the misinformation, or lack of information, that college students have to consider when signing up through voter registration drives.
“What’s happening is they’re going out across campus over here and just getting people to sign the registration forms left and right and not telling them issues to consider, or telling them the incorrect information,” said Wertz. “Before they make the decision to register with us, they need to check with the accountant who does the taxes. They need to check if they’re on their parents’ health insurance. By being at a separate permanent address, does that affect their insurance?”
“I was just trying to inform them of things to consider, and then once they’ve made an informed decision and decide to come with us, we welcome them,” Wertz said.
“We don’t want to suppress them from voting and we certainly want them to vote. It’s just, what’s best for them is what they need to consider. Unfortunately, the campaigns, they’re not concerned with what’s best for the student. They’re generally concerned with just getting people signed up.”
From Tuesday through Friday of last week, voter registration drives at Virginia Tech brought more than 2,000 new registrations to the county, Wertz said. He also estimated that about 25 students have called to ask if the county could cancel the processing of their registration.
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