12 states have new voter ID laws. Ohio's strict rules blocked 8,000 from voting

Lynn Brown is an 80-year-old Democrat from Cleveland who’s been voting since she was 18. But when she tried to do so in March, she had a problem she’d never experienced.

Brown, who typically votes absentee, was unable to get a mail ballot. So she went in person to her local polling place, the first time she’s done so since Ohio passed one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country.

She’s still not quite sure what the issue was, but records called the issue “non-matching” identification. She filled out a paper ballot, known as a provisional ballot, and waited for elections officials to decide whether it should be counted. It wasn’t.

Brown is one of thousands of Ohioans who have been unable to cast a valid vote as they show up to polling places but find their identification isn’t enough to comply. The law, enacted in 2023 as part of a wave of voting restrictions pushed by Republicans after the 2020 election, offers few options to people to prove their identities.

Advocates say Ohio officials have not educated voters enough about the new law, which went into effect months before a pair of hotly contested referendum votes related to abortion rights. Voters who spoke to USA TODAY often didn’t know their ballot didn’t count.

The result is election-year chaos in the former swing state, where two-term Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, is fighting to keep his tenuous grasp on a Senate seat that his party will need to control the upper chamber in Congress. Republicans are also eying congressional seat pickups in the Akron and Toledo areas to shore up their narrow majority in the House.

“Ohio’s an important state, and we need to make sure that votes are being counted and count it correctly,” said state Sen. Theresa Gavarone, a Republican from Bowling Green who championed the photo ID law in the Ohio legislature. “The goal is to make our elections more secure.”

Lynn Brown, who is not related to Sen. Brown, said she plans to vote in November, but she wants to do it absentee so she doesn’t have to deal with going to the polls. She’s trying not to worry about any problems that could arise.

“I think it might have some issues, but I can’t do nothing about that,” she said. “All I can do is try to vote and do my part.”

More than 8,000 disenfranchised under Ohio voter ID law

Before the new law's passage, Ohio had a less strict voter ID law that allowed those who could not provide a photo ID to use a utility bill or other piece of official mail to verify their identities.

Since Ohio’s voter ID law went into effect, more than 8,000 people have attempted to vote but not had their ballots counted because they didn’t present acceptable ID, according to data from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office.

The elections in question included two that affected whether Ohio would codify abortion rights into the state constitution and the March 19 primary that nominated former President Donald Trump-backed businessman Bernie Moreno for Brown’s Senate seat. Analysts say either party could win that race come Nov. 5.

“The Ohio voter ID law only accepts four types of ID,” said Ceridwen Cherry, the legal director for VoteRiders, an advocacy group that helps people get voter ID. “They have to be unexpired. They have to be photo ID, and they have to be government-issued.”

And while voters in many other states with strict voter ID laws can use some form of expired ID to vote, Ohio makes no such allowance, making its law among the strictest of the strict.

Alexander Eldridge, who lives in a suburb of Columbus, also saw his provisional vote rejected in the March primary because of a lack of ID. He didn’t realize the provisional ballot wasn’t counted.

“My ID was expired,” he said. “That’s all. I didn’t know it was expired.”

12 states have new voter ID requirements since 2020

Ohio is one of 12 states that passed laws stiffening their in-person voter identification laws in the wake of the 2020 election and Trump's false claims of mass voter fraud, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. Others include Florida, Georgia and New Hampshire.

A court decision in North Carolina led to stricter requirements there, too. South Carolina and Indiana stiffened ID requirements for mail-in ballots only.

“What we see as a consistent pattern is that voter ID laws are sort of passed with the public messaging to address supposed voter fraud,” said Ceridwen Cherry, the legal director for VoteRiders. “At the same time, there is no evidence that any of that voter fraud is taking place.”

The stricter voter ID requirements are often part of larger omnibus laws or packages of laws that make voting harder in other ways, like making it harder to get or return an absentee ballot or reducing the availability of absentee ballot drop boxes, leaving many people with the only option of in-person voting with ID.

While these laws generally allow citizens to get free non-driver photo ID for voting purposes – something that the conservative Heritage Foundation says is crucial to making sure voting is still accessible – critics say it’s still hard for people to get them. For example, people who need these IDs often don’t drive.

Ohio’s law stands out for its strictness. Among the nine states with so-called strict photo ID laws, it offers the smallest number of options for proving an identity and is one of only two that won’t allow an expired ID. (The other is Kansas.)

A January study from the University of Maryland, commissioned by nonprofits including VoteRiders and the Brennan Center, found that nearly 21 million Americans don’t have a non-expired driver's license.

“Anecdotally, what we’ve been hearing, is the biggest thing that’s tripping up people is it can’t be expired,” said Cherry, from VoteRiders.

Provisional ballots used more, rejected more often

The only way a voter who shows up to the polls can get out of the ID requirement is if they have a religious objection to being photographed. Otherwise, their only remaining option is to fill out a paper ballot that the elections office sets aside until the voter returns within four days to show their photo ID. (Until this new law, voters had seven days after the election to fix their ballot.)

These types of paper ballots, called provisional ballots, were designed to allow people to fill out a ballot if a poll worker couldn’t determine on the spot if the person was registered. Then the worker would take the time to look up the voter registration to determine whether to throw out the ballot or count it.

But since the ID law went into effect, thousands of Ohioans have been given provisional ballots because they aren’t showing proper ID. And thousands aren’t showing up to fix the issue.

“These are people who got up, went to their polling location on Election Day,” said Kayla Griffin, the Ohio state director for All Voting Is Local, a voting rights advocacy group. “And I think that’s important.”

In the March primary, Ohio’s most recent election, a failure to show ID was the most common reason a provisional ballot was rejected, accounting for more than 40% of provisional ballot rejections, a change from years past when the most common reason was that the person wasn’t registered to vote in Ohio.

More than 1,100 provisional ballots were thrown out because of a failure to show proper ID, more than seven times as high as in the March 2020 primary, a similar presidential year that saw nearly identical turnout.

A similar situation unfolded in North Carolina. In the March 2020 presidential primary, when a less strict voter ID law was in place, about 9,000 people voted provisionally because of a lack of ID, according to data from the state board of elections. About 5,700 of those were not counted.

In this year's March presidential primary, nearly 62,000 North Carolinians voted provisional because of an ID issue. About 24,500 of those ballots were not counted, and another 500 ballots were only partially counted.

Advocates criticize lack of education initiatives

Voters don’t always realize that they need photo ID to make their vote count at the polls because they voted for years under the more lenient ID law, and they didn’t receive any outreach explaining the new requirements to them.

And sometimes in-person voting on Election Day is their only option. The same law that stiffened ID on in-person voting stiffened ID requirements for getting absentee ballots and eliminated in-person early voting the Monday before an election.

“I didn’t have any problem until this time when I went to vote,” said Cynthia Robinson, who votes in Toledo, Ohio. She has voted since 2015 and even worked the polls in years past, but she said she had no idea she needed a photo ID.

In March, she filled out a provisional ballot, but she was unaware her provisional ballot wasn’t counted until USA TODAY contacted her. She said she planned to get a new ID so she could vote.

Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a left-leaning good-government advocacy group, criticized the state of Ohio for not funding an educational program, instead leaving the responsibility up to county election boards, voting rights groups and candidates.

“It was all piecemeal,” Turcer said. “And that’s why when we look at the impact on the strict ID, we also have to look at this missing voter education piece. They didn’t spend the money in 2023 to educate voters, and they certainly aren’t spending it this year to educate voters, and we have a presidential election.”

Mike West, the spokesperson for the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland, said staff did outreach through libraries, contacting journalists, and attending public events like church picnics. But the office didn’t get any funding from the state to do it.

“We're lucky that we do have the resources to use every method at our disposal to do a lot of voter education,” West said. “I can see that in other counties where they don’t have the resources or the know-how, it’s a little more difficult.”

Gavarone, the state senator, contends that the state “undertook extensive efforts” to make sure people understood the law. She pointed to signs at her own county elections office that informed people who came in that they needed a photo ID.

“Right now, we’ve had four elections through this, so hopefully, by this November everybody is very familiar with the new laws in place,” Gavarone said. “But I’m certainly happy to talk to our boards of elections or our secretary of state to see if there’s something more we can do to make sure people are aware.”

Republicans defend the bill

The majority of Americans support voter identification laws, and the laws are even more popular among Republicans. A January poll from Pew Research Center found that 69% of Democrats and 95% of Republicans support requiring people to show government-issued photo ID to vote.

Ohio's law is so strict that the Heritage Foundation catapulted the state up the list from No. 17 in 2022 to No. 9 in 2023 on its Election Integrity Scorecard . In 2024, since more states have stiffened their laws, Ohio is No. 13, right behind Texas.

“A photo ID requirement strikes many as an elementary precaution to protect the voting process,” Jack Fitzhenry, a legal fellow for the Heritage Foundation, wrote in a blog post. “Try boarding a plane or buying a beer without one.”

Kay Matteo, a Republican from Grove City , Ohio, has no hard feelings about the state not counting the provisional ballot from her father, 94-year-old Walter Harris, a Republican. She said he recently stopped driving and let his license expire, and he hasn’t gotten a new one.

“We’re all proponents of having an ID, so we like that idea and think people should have IDs, and that’s the only way we can get a fair election,” Matteo said. She said it was their fault for forgetting to get her father a new ID.

Ohio provides free state IDs to people who provide a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers. Most drivers can renew their licenses online for a fee, but people 65 and older must go in person.

Matteo said they just need the basic ID, but she’s not sure she’ll be able to get around to bringing him in to get one.

“We’re dealing with a lot of stuff with him right now,” she said. “You just have to prioritize sometimes when you’re a caregiver.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 12 states have new voter ID laws. Ohio's strict rules blocked 8,000 from voting