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<div class="date">Saturday, September 25, 2004</div>
<div class="byline"> Mark Niquette </div>
<div class="srcline">THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH</div>
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<p>Thousands of Ohio voters are at risk of not having their ballots
counted on Election Day under state guidelines for handling provisional
ballots, critics of those rules say. </p>
<p>Some are even calling the situation "the next hanging chad," a
reference to problems in the 2000 presidential election. </p>
<p>"It’s
a huge issue," said Daniel P. Tokaji, a voting-rights lawyer and
assistant professor of law at Ohio State University. Provisional voting
allows properly registered voters to cast ballots even when their names
don’t appear on registration rolls at the polls because they moved or
they were left off. </p>
<p>Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell recently issued a directive to county election officials
saying they are allowed to count provisional ballots only from voters
who go to the correct polling location for their home address. </p>
<p>Voting-rights
groups had pushed for a more liberal directive allowing votes for at
least the presidential and statewide offices to be counted, even if a
voter casts a provisional ballot in the wrong precinct. </p>
<p>The
Ohio Voter Protection Project, a coalition of votingrights groups, is
considering a lawsuit to challenge that directive before the Nov. 2
election, project attorney Sean Grayson said yesterday. </p>
<p>Similar lawsuits have been filed in Colorado, Florida and Missouri;
the Florida lawsuit was rejected this week. </p>
<p>Ohio
is one of 29 states that will not count provisional ballots cast in the
wrong precinct, said Dan Seligson, editor of electionline.org, a
nonpartisan Web site covering voting procedures. </p>
<p>Seventeen
states will count at least the presidential and statewide races on
provisional ballots from voters in wrong precincts, while five states
have no pre-election registration requirement, he said. </p>
<p>Ohio
has had provisional balloting for more than a decade, mostly to
accommodate residents who moved but did not update their voter
registration. Such ballots are not counted for 10 days while election
workers verify voter eligibility. </p>
<p>But after election problems
were magnified by the razorclose 2000 presidential race — including
eligible voters wrongly being turned away from the polls — Congress
passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. </p>
<p>Part of that act,
known as HAVA, requires states that did not have provisional voting to
adopt it for voters who believe they are properly registered. That
allows their vote to be counted if eligibility is confirmed later. </p>
<p>In
Franklin County and other areas with electronic voting machines, voters
typically are given a punch-card machine at the polls to cast a
provisional ballot. </p>
<p>But HAVA says state laws will determine how
provisional ballots are counted, and Ohio’s law clearly says voters may
not cast ballots in a precinct where they do not live, Blackwell
spokesman Carlo LoParo said. </p>
<p>Blackwell has ordered that if
residents go to the wrong precinct, poll workers must find their
correct precinct and tell them where to go, LoParo said. They may also
cast provisional ballots at their county election board. </p>
<p>Critics
argue that on a busy Election Day with potentially long lines, harried
poll workers may not follow through or voters may not have the time or
transportation to go elsewhere. </p>
<p>Critics also worry that with
tens of thousands of new voters registering for this fall’s election —
and precinct boundaries and polling locations have changed since past
elections — many voters won’t know or be told their correct polling
place. </p>
<p>"The intent behind HAVA was to liberalize the process," Grayson
said. "It seems to me Ohio is going in the opposite direction." </p>
<p>Observers
say there’s no way to predict how many voters may be affected, and
LoParo disputes the suggestion that it will be a large number. He noted
that 93 percent of the 54,137 provisional ballots cast in the 2002
general election were counted, and 91 percent of the nearly 100,000
ballots in 2000. </p>
<p>Still, Kay Maxwell, national president of the
League of Women Voters, says that’s too many lost votes. She thinks the
Ohio law violates at least the spirit of HAVA, and it could be a
critical problem if the presidential election is as close as pundits
expect. </p>
<p>"Any single voter who is disfranchised is one too many," Maxwell
said yesterday during a visit to Columbus. </p>
<p>The
key will be educating both poll workers and voters before the election
about the process, said Michael Sciortino, president of the Ohio
Association of Election Officials and director of the Mahoning County
elections board. </p>
<p>Sciortino advises voters who are unsure about where to vote to call
their county board of election before Election Day. </p>
<p>"It
has a potential of being a very big issue, and how we train and how we
prepare for it will dictate how we handle the situation," he said. </p>
<p><b><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:mniquette@dispatch.com">mniquette@dispatch.com</a> </b><br>
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