Ohio has a controversial practice of removing voters from the rolls who have not cast ballots in years. But just how many are deleted remains a mystery, raising questions about the care taken with the swing-state’s voter rolls. The practice itself has attracted scrutiny – it’s the subject of one of several federal lawsuits over voting in the battleground state. But the way officials delete and track voter registrations raises other concerns. Depending on where you live, county election officials might diligently remove thousands of voter registrations each year, documented by detailed records. Or they might insist they haven’t followed through with the state-ordered process in some years, or apologize for tossing those files years ago, according to an Enquirer / USA Today Network investigation, in which Ohio reporters contacted all 88 county board of elections.
While nearly every county was happy to discuss what local officials call the “voter purge” process, the records they provided were a morass of half-kept data and confusing spikes in removed voters. And the numbers they sent to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission weren’t much better.
At best, these records reveal a lack of care by some election officials tracking voters taken off the rolls.
At worst, they point to a system of removing voters that’s far from uniform – meaning where you live could determine when, or if, your voter registration is deleted. And that could affect whose votes count, and whose don’t, in a critical battleground state that may determine the next president.
Full Article: How many were removed from Ohio’s voter rolls? It’s a mess.