Current News

Voter suppression is repugnant to our democracy. And Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s recent decision to limit ballot drop-off boxes is just another chapter in the shameful story of Ohio’s history of voter suppression.

Ohio proved itself to be a national leader in voter suppression two years ago when its voter-purge system was legally challenged and, sadly, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Ohio then went about purging voters who hadn’t voted in six years, initially identifying 235,000 of them, but later finding that nearly 50,000 were wrongfully identified. In the end, LaRose purged more than 180,000 names from voter rolls.
 
And now the 2020 election will be held during a global pandemic that has proven especially deadly to elderly populations and is disproportionately affecting people of color.
 
It would stand to reason that the job of the secretary of state is to work with local boards of election to find ways to make voting easy, not difficult. But while many local boards of election and elected officials have been working hard to find secure and safe ways for voters to participate, LaRose has decided to make voting more difficult -- that is, in urban areas which tend to be lower-income, more racially diverse, and more likely to vote Democratic.

LaRose is forbidding the placement of secure ballot drop-off boxes at various places off-site of election boards. Cuyahoga County has just one drop box, which is in a small parking lot behind the board’s headquarters in Cleveland.

And LaRose has decided that each of Ohio’s 88 counties will have just one drop box location. So Cuyahoga County, with a population of 1.2 million, will have the same number of drop boxes as Marion County, with a population of 65,000, or Vinton County, with less than 14,000 residents.

Cleveland has repeatedly been a target of voter suppression through purges, elimination of voter polling places and restrictions on voting by mail. Now, in this upcoming election, the coronavirus pandemic has added another layer of difficulty to the voting process.

Secretary LaRose’s drop box order creates a disparate situation for voters in Ohio, which unfairly burdens voters in communities such as Cleveland, thereby violating the spirit of the Voting Rights Act, and the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Ohio’s controversial voter purge law - which purges voters who haven’t voted in four years - voting-rights groups were outraged and lost no time criticizing the decision as a way to give states a blueprint on how to suppress voting. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who voted against the Ohio purging, noted in a separate dissent that in predominantly African American communities in Cincinnati, 10 percent of voters had been purged, compared to 4 percent of voters in a suburban, majority white community.
 
As we move closer to the 2020 election, we do so with more than 180,000 Ohio voters purged from voting rolls and only one drop box in each of the state’s 88 counties. Further, we’ve been warned by the U.S. Postal Service that mailed ballots might not arrive on time to be counted by the board of elections, while removing mail boxes and sorting machines.

These are alarming threats to our democratic system and we, as a people, need to expose them for what they are – underhanded and insidious schemes aimed at disenfranchising blocks of voters, namely people of color and low-wage workers living in densely populated urban areas.

Cleveland City Council plans to adopt a resolution condemning these unsavory tactics, and I urge all citizens of Ohio to speak out against them. Tell Frank LaRose we won’t tolerate his scams. Tell him his job is to give voters more access to the democratic process, not less.

This opinion piece was published in The Plain Dealer and on Cleveland.com