Ohio scores major victories for peak voter participation

Ohioans who value maximum free and unfettered access to the ballot box can relish two impressive victories over the past week.

First, the Ohio House of Representatives on Wednesday adopted its version of the state’s 2016-17 biennium budget that restored $1.25 million to pay for absentee-ballot application mailings to all registered voters in the state. The critical funding had been excluded in the initial House-amended version of the budget bill.

Second, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s office last week reached agreement with the League of Women Voters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other groups on a federal lawsuit challenging earlier limits and restrictions placed on early voting. That deal greatly expands early-voting opportunities for residents of all 88 counties.

Collectively, those developments hold promise toward ensuring the Buckeye State sheds its one-time sullied image as a bastion of voter suppression. Instead it can rise as a national model for accommodating and encouraging all residents to have their legitimate say in our representative government.

As we argued last week in urging the Ohio House to restore the funding for absentee-ballot mailings, Husted simply was following the law in requesting the $1.2 million appropriation. The Legislature last year passed a bill that bars county elections boards from mailing unsolicited applications but that gives that authority solely to the secretary of state to ensure uniformity and fairness statewide.

We are pleased that reticent Republican legislators came to their senses to realize that the paltry expenditure — $1.2 million from a $71.5 billion spending plan — will reap exceedingly large benefits. It will put to rest at last charges that some lawmakers prefer to constrict rather than expand incentives to vote.

Ohio, poised once again to play a major role in next year’s presidential election, can ill afford to have the eyes of the nation focused suspiciously on any potential hint of voter suppression.

Charges of voter suppression also were at the heart of the federal lawsuit initiated by the NAACP and the LWV. They rightly argued that the reduction of one week from early voting, plus the limiting of weekend and evening voting hours, disproportionately affected lower-income, homeless and black voters.

Sunday voting

Under the agreement, an additional Sunday of voting will be added, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. during the third week of early voting for general elections that include voting for the president. For gubernatorial general elections and presidential primaries, there will be an additional two hours of weekday-evening voting during the fourth week of early voting.

That settlement represents an acknowledgement that the Buckeye State places a high priority on maximizing voter participation. As Freda Levenson, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which represented the groups suing the state, put it, “All Ohioans are winners here.”

Husted, the state’s chief elections officer, agrees: “This agreement is a victory for Ohio voters. … Ohio has been and will remain a state where it is easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

Of course, the two major victories for voter access this month won’t close the book on efforts to maximize voter participation. For example, we’re hoping that Husted’s longstanding pleas for efficient and secure online voter registration gets the airing and approval it deserves from reluctant lawmakers.

For now, however, the promise of absentee ballot applications sent to all Ohioans and the expansion of early-voting days and hours have the Buckeye State positioned to stand as a leader — not a lackey — in the march toward a more robust participatory democracy.