Ohio newspaper: State’s voting records full of duplicate registrations, glitches

CINCINNATI (AP) — Ohio’s voter rolls include people who list their address as the middle of the Ohio River, more than 6,000 people who are registered twice and hundreds who are not even old enough to cast a ballot, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The state’s voting records are full of glitches and duplicates, even including people who list addresses that, if they existed, would be in the parking lot outside the stadium where the Bengals play football. The Cincinnati Enquirer found thousands of voters were registered on multiple lists, some as many as six times.

The findings come as voting integrity is under scrutiny ahead of the Nov. 4 election, with scores of lawsuits being filed before the first votes are counted.

The Enquirer reviewed more than 8 million voter registration records. Among their findings:

UAt least 6,567 voters were registered more than once at the same address. Of those, 157 voters, mostly in the Democratic stronghold of Cuyahoga County, are registered three or more times. Two voters from Cleveland appear on the voter rolls six times each.

UAt least 589 voters listed dates of birth that indicate they aren’t old enough to cast a ballot.

UIn southwest Ohio’s Hamilton County, 17 residents say they listed street numbers that would put their homes somewhere in the Ohio River.

UAnother 46 voters are registered at addresses that would put their homes in Paul Brown Stadium’s parking lot or The Banks, an entertainment complex not yet built.

USome voters are registered at police stations and park benches.

UFour officers on city payroll list Cincinnati Police Department’s District 1 headquarters as their registration.

U73 voters’ names have apparent typos, such as a first name of “%” listed.

“It’s definitely a concern. Obviously it should be fixed,” said Nathan Cemenska, an election law expert at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

“Election officials need to work on this. It’s a big public-relations problem for them, but they’re between a rock and a hard place,” said Cemenska, a Democrat. “They get beat up in the media for having all these bad voters on the books, but if they take them off they open themselves up to criticism from the other side that they’re disenfranchising voters.”

The registrations already have taken the state’s top elections official to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Ohio Republican Party sued Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner over her handling of the state’s voter registration roster.

The Ohio GOP wanted Brunner, a Democrat, to release data about than 200,000 new voter registrations that didn’t jibe with government databases from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles and Social Security Administration.

The Supreme Court ruled in Brunner’s favor, saying the Ohio GOP doesn’t have a right to sue for that information. A Republican fund-raising consultant from the Columbus area last week filed a lawsuit as an individual.

The Enquirer analysis looked for inconsistencies in Brunner’s central voter registration database on Oct. 14. Registrations for this election closed Oct. 6.

Diane Goldsmith, who leads voter registrations at the Hamilton County Board of Elections, said many of the voters don’t realize they are registered multiple times.

“Frankly, I’d rather have people in there twice than not at all. It’s not a big deal,” Goldsmith said.