The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday put an end to the Ohio Democratic Party’s push to restore a week in which Ohioans could register and vote at the same time. Within weeks of that ruling, Republican-controlled state legislatures began enacting laws that made voting more hard – cutting back on early voting days, adopting strict voter ID provisions, and other measures. Democrats sued, saying that it was a voting procedure disproportionately used by minority voters.
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OH had argued that the rollback was needed to reduce administrative burdens on local election officials. In 2008, 60,000 people voted during the Golden Week period in OH and 80,000 did so in 2012.
Meanwhile, in a separate case, a panel of the Cincinnati-based US 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday voted 2-1 that the state can not reject absentee ballots simply because required address and birth date information on accompanying identification envelopes is not filled out with “technical precision”.
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a Mahoning County man could be tried a fifth time for the murder of an Austintown woman, despite previous mistrials, hung juries and legal proceedings that have stretched over a dozen plus years.
The court’s one-line order leaving the cutbacks intact noted no dissents. In this one case, however, it meant that the lower court decision upholding the early voting rollback was left in place. She said she sent all three back and has voted twice since they first arrived past year.
A federal judge ruled in May that the 2014 law eliminating the practice violated the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act, but a three-judge appellate panel overruled that decision last month.
Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted praised the Supreme Court decision September 13. A federal appeals court reversed that last month, in part citing the options OH gives for early voting. Two years later, though, they passed a series of bills that rolled out more restrictions, including getting rid of Golden Week and cutting early voting days from 35 to 28.
Privately, Democratic lawyers were not surprised by the court’s action Tuesday, since they had little expectation of blocking the OH cutbacks – especially compared with the far more draconian changes in other states such as Texas, North Carolina and MI.
The Supreme Court’s action is temporary, affecting only the fall elections.
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Husted has called the lawsuit politically motivated and says it’s part of a trend of unelected federal judges writing Ohio’s elections laws.
