Voting Rights

Common Cause, the civil rights organization, for instance, helped recruit 6,500 monitors this year — double the number in 2016, a presidential election year.

"It's like a domino effect," said Sara Henderson, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, about the voting issues in Georgia. "We expect lots of problems at the polling places because there has been a complete lack of voter education."

The good government group Common Cause is monitoring voting concerns around the country. Its president, Karen Hobert Flynn, said most of the problems reported to date are fairly typical. "We are waiting to see what else will come out," she said.

The result of purging voter roles is many inactive voters, who had not moved, being removed from voter rolls. This approach is not an efficient way to update voter rolls because it results in a large number of eligible voters being purged from the voter rolls. Fortunately, the federal appeals court later ruled that the Ohio boards of elections must count provisional ballots in the 2018 midterm elections for certain individuals who were previously purged from the voter rolls.

Today, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals returned a ruling that empowers more Ohioans to make their voices heard at the ballot box. The ruling addresses the voters who were aggressively purged from the voter rolls, granting them the right to vote provisionally and have their ballots counted. This ruling will give more Ohioans an opportunity to help chart the course for our state in the future. With so much at stake in this year’s election, I’m heartened knowing that more eligible voters will have the option to take part in our democracy.

Today, Common Cause released a new report on more than two dozen ballot initiatives and state constitutional amendments to strengthen, and in some cases undercut, democracy that will be decided by voters at the state and local level in November. “Democracy on the Ballot” traces the growing momentum behind citizen-driven pro-democracy reforms in recent years and examines initiatives and amendments on ballots in the 2018 general election from Florida to California and from North Dakota to New Mexico and urges support or opposition to each.