Golden Week voting in Ohio not so golden in light of court ruling

A federal appellate court panel rejected the reinstatement of Ohio’s so-called Golden Week that allowed people to register and then vote on the same day for a six-day period.

Rather than being able to vote 35 days before the election as Ohioans could do from 2005 until the Republican-led General Assembly eliminated Golden Week in 2014, state voters have 29 days to cast ballots before an election.

While Ohio Democrats are upset about the decision saying it discriminates against black voters, Republicans point out that this state still has one of the longest periods of early voting in the country.

Some Republicans say it’s too long.

Mahoning County Republican Party Chairman Mark Munroe, who also heads the county board of elections, said he would like to see early voting restricted to two weeks before the election.

His point is it makes it very difficult for candidates to figure out the best use of their resources. If candidates are spending money on reaching out to people who voted two or three weeks earlier, it’s a waste of time and financial resources.

And being able to vote nearly a month before Election Day could lead to voter remorse, he said.

We’ve seen cases over the years of candidates imploding or a scandal uncovered in the final few weeks of campaigns. If people have already voted, they can’t take their ballots back.

Of course, in the Mahoning Valley we’ve seen officeholders indicted – and subsequently convicted – just a few months after they were elected and there’s nothing we can do to change our votes.

Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican who opposed Golden Week, said: “Ohio offers a generous number of days, hours and ways to vote – making us one of the easiest states in which to cast a ballot.”

Golden Week would have started Oct. 6. Oct. 11 is the last day to register for the fall election. Early voting starts Oct. 12, the day after the registration deadline and 29 days before the Nov. 8 election.

Husted, who’s led the charge to make it tougher to vote in the name of fighting fraud, is correct that Ohioans have a lot of time to cast ballots compared to other states.

There are 13, including New York, that don’t allow early voting at all.

There are three states – Colorado, Oregon and Washington – that use an all-mail system.

The rest of the states have early voting in some form.

Most of them have much shorter time frames for early voting than Ohio.

In theory, early voting makes the voting process easier as it is supposed to shrink lines at polling locations on Election Day with fewer people going there to cast ballots.

Yet there’s often problems on Election Day that end up with a judge deciding to extend voting hours or forbidding county boards of elections to release results in a timely manner.

In an email to supporters, Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper wrote of Golden Week: “This decision will have a discriminatory impact on Ohio voters, but we will not give up the fight to protect voting rights for all Ohioans. We plan to appeal this ruling, and we want you with us to stand up for voting rights for all Ohioans.”

In a statement to the media, Pepper said Golden Week “has been a popular and cherished feature of our elections for a decade and has allowed tens of thousands of Ohioans to safely and conveniently cast a ballot.”

U.S. District Court Judge Michael H. Watson reinstated Golden Week in May. In his ruling, he said elimination of the extra early voting time hurt black voters in particular. He said evidence showed black voters use same-day registration and voting at higher rates than whites, so to eliminate Golden Week would violate the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act.

“It is reasonable to conclude from this evidence that their right to vote will be modestly burdened,” the judge said in his ruling.

The appeals court decision on Tuesday read: “The undisputed factual record shows that it’s easy to vote in Ohio. Very easy, actually. Viewing S.B. 238 [the bill that eliminated Golden Week] as one component of Ohio’s progressive voting system, and considering the many options that remain available to Ohio voters, even accepting the district court’s focus on the changes wrought by S.B. 238, the removal of Golden Week can hardly be deemed to impose a true ‘burden’ on any person’s right to vote.”

The best solution – and one that won’t happen soon, if ever – is for the country to have universal voting dates.

We used to have one day to vote.

That is no longer what many voters want, and several states have made changes to provide more opportunities to cast ballots.

That has led to different voting rules all over the country.

Another problem is we have different voting systems depending on where you are. In Ohio, there are counties with paper ballots and others with electronic touch-screen voting machines.

Improvements have been made since voting problems occurred during the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, but we are still far from giving every voter the same opportunity to cast a ballot.