OHIO State considers ways to make Election Day easier

About 5.6 million people in the state voted Tuesday.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- Ohio's top elections official, lawmakers and elections experts say Ohio should change its laws to make voting easier and help avoid the court battles and long lines of this year's election.
Democrats are already huddling over proposals such as longer poll hours, relaxing the standards for absentee ballots and joining the two dozen states with polling places that open a few days, or in some cases, weeks early.
Republican leaders, who control the House and Senate, say they want more time to study options.
"We need to look for ways to make voting easier without jeopardizing the integrity of the election process," said Rep. Jon Husted, a Kettering Republican expected to become House speaker in January. "I don't want to over-react or under-react."
Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican and the state's top elections official, has advocated allowing an absentee ballot for any voter who requests one.
"It's something you can do to eliminate long lines and long waits," he said Wednesday.
How many voted
About 5.6 million Ohioans voted Tuesday -- 600,000 more than in the 2000 election. In many precincts voters waited in long lines, often in steady rain.
Court battles over a state law allowing partisan challengers in polling places raged until the wee hours of Election Day. On election night, a federal judge ordered officials in Franklin and Knox counties to speed up the voting with paper ballots.
"What happened this year is a strong argument in favor of early voting," said Edward Foley, director of the elections law program at Ohio State University. "We don't need to have the kind of inconvenience and really sort of embarrassing process that occurred this year."
Anyone in line when the polls closed at 7:30 p.m. was allowed to stay until all could cast a ballot. That was 4 a.m. Wednesday in the precinct that covers both the village of Gambier and Kenyon College.
Last-minute registrations doubled the number of voters in the precinct, too late for elections officials to order more machines, Knox County elections director Pamela Hinkens said.
The registration deadline is 30 days before the election, and state law requires 30 days' notice for a county board to change a polling place, so officials couldn't split the crowded precinct in two, Hinkens said.
"The very first thing I would love to talk to lawmakers about is changing the deadline time for voter registration," she said, maybe cutting it off two months before the election.
Want it later
But Democrats are talking about later voter registration, up to two weeks before the election, said House Minority Leader Chris Redfern, of Port Clinton. Members also will draft bills to extend polling place hours and drop restrictions on issuing absentee ballots.
"Any opportunity that we can increase the franchise, I think we have to take," Redfern said.
Ohio should build on the experience of other states, said Sen. C.J. Prentiss, of Cleveland, expected to take over as Senate minority leader.
"This needs to be a state that has early voting," she said. "This needs to be a state that is real clear on all the guidelines six months out -- something other than what we had this time."
Sen. Bill Harris, expected to be the next Senate president, said he's awaiting a proposal from Blackwell. "I tend to be a little more cautious in making sure we don't create opportunity that would tend to make fraud more easy," he said.
Foley said both federal and state law needs to change, and each element needs work to repair the whole system.
"We need to fix the machines that we use, we need to fix the registration system and we need to fix the polling place administration," he said.