Getty Images photo of voters in line.
And so, it begins. In-person early voting and absentee voting by mail — from Tuesday, Oct. 8 through Sunday, Nov. 3 — is now officially underway in Ohio. Even before closing arguments are made in the 2024 election, registered Ohio voters (roughly 8 million) can start casting their ballots at their county board of elections before Election Day. Check location and times for your county board of elections.
If you haven’t voted since the last presidential election in 2020, you could be in for a rude awakening when you get to the polls. Many Ohioans (not obsessively preoccupied with politics, like yours truly) are unaware that Republican lawmakers in Columbus enacted one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country in 2023 — despite no evidence of significant voter fraud, by impersonation or otherwise.
[ 2024 Voter Guide: The candidates, the ballot measures, and the tools you need to cast your vote. ]
Voting restrictions (in GOP-controlled legislatures) to address nonexistent problems of pervasive voting fraud were turbocharged in the wake of Donald Trump’s fraudulent efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. (This is usually when I have to breathe deeply). Since then, some 28 states, including Ohio, have passed new laws making it harder to vote in order to “combat concerns” generated by false Republican claims about widespread voting scams.
Ohio Republicans dove into more voter suppression at the front-end last year with legislated hurdles to ballot access that caught surprised voters off guard. Thousands who had voted uneventfully for years with previously acceptable IDs (i.e., utility bills, bank statements) were suddenly prevented from voting under new, stringent rules rolled out right before the May 2023 primary.
Those who showed up without the proper, government-issued photo ID could fill out a provisional ballot and double-back to their board of elections with the right credentials in a fast clip (four days, reduced from 10) to hopefully have their vote counted. Tough luck if voters lacked the resources or transportation to obtain the newly prescribed documentation in time.
The number of provisional ballots thrown out for failure to produce the right paperwork rose tenfold after the Republican law went into effect, according to one report that raised the specter of historic levels of rejected ballots in Ohio’s 2024 presidential election. The Madison Township Republican who sponsored the bill that erected the additional obstacles to voting, state Rep. Thomas Hall, told cleveland.com (ludicrously) that disenfranchising so many voters, particularly the Democratic-leaning kind, was never his intention.
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He could have followed up with, “If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for any ubiquitous outreach by state Republicans to broadly educate the voting public on all the legal changes and requirements (impediments?) that could affect how and whether Ohioans have a voice in the upcoming election. So, do your homework. Share what you know with other would-be voters in your life.
Verify that you are a registered voter in Ohio before you go to the polls on Vote.gov. Be sure you have not been wrongly purged by Ohio’s desperately partisan and mistake-prone Secretary of State Frank LaRose — who has notoriously swept eligible voters off the rolls in removal practices deemed among the worst in the nation.
Make a plan to vote. I know that sounds almost cliché, but when you plan to vote you actually have to think through the how, when and where of getting it done. That’s important. So is the choice you make between now and Nov. 5 to either engage in your most fundamental voting right (upon which all our civil liberties rest) or to live with the consequences of not voting.
But understand that real decisions are going to be made by the next president, by the next U.S. senator from Ohio, by the next justices who control the state supreme court, by the next state senator and state representative on your 2024 Ohio general election ballot. What do you want next and who do you believe, based on incontrovertible fact, will deliver on that? Are you willing to show up and be a part of making it happen?
The outcome of this particular election on the state and federal level will profoundly affect whether and to what degree we ultimately endure as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” It is a referendum on the value we place on freedoms once considered inalienable from the freedom of voting and representational equality to the freedom of women to determine their own destiny and the freedom of all Americans to not live in fear of another mass shooting.
This election in Ohio and nationwide is a referendum on our republic itself and whether, as Benjamin Franklin mused with prescience, we “can keep it.” What’s it worth to you to navigate the exhausting barriers to participate in self-governance, to exercise your birthright franchise defiantly despite massive voter purges and extreme voting laws?
Think about it. No one is coming to the rescue. It’s up to us. Always has been.
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