Ohio provides election ideas

PA committee looks to Western neighbor for potential reforms

To help ensure against electoral cheating, everything connected with receiving and counting ballots in Ohio is done in bipartisan fashion, according to that state's Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who testified last week in the latest in a series of election hearings conducted by the Pennsylvania House State Government Committee.

"I joke that it takes both a Republican and a Democrat to screw in a lightbulb," LaRose said last week. "Even the buildings are designed in a bipartisan way."

The Republican-led committee has been bringing in guests to talk about various election topics, looking toward election reform in the aftermath of the recent presidential contest, whose results Republicans initially challenged, although Democrats have been skeptical, seeing the effort as a ploy to disenfranchise voters who skew in their favor.

Ohio's election was the most secure in its history, with the help of rules that make all aspects of the work bipartisan, according to LaRose, a Republican.

In all 88 Ohio counties, the doors to all the rooms used for ballot storage, vote tabulation machines and election servers have double locks -- one that can be opened only by a key held by Democrats and one that can be opened only by a key held by Republicans, LaRose said.

"Like the old submarine movies," he said. "It takes two keys to launch the torpedoes."

It isn't like that in Pennsylvania, where election offices are run by hired professional staffers, said committee Chairman Seth Grove, R-York, in a phone interview after the meeting.

Ohio's way of doing it seems "smart," and one of the potential best practices that Grove hopes to identify in the committee's "deep dive" into election procedures over 14 scheduled hearings that will stretch into May, he said.

While the hearings may have begun amid a tide of partisan animosity, the partisanship seems to be subsiding, Grove said.

The hearings have not been "a circus," he said.

Instead, his goal for them has been "to get past the rhetoric and focus on policy."

One indication of the more collegial tone of late was banter last week between the Democratic administration's Deputy Secretary of State Jonathan Marks and Rep. Paul Schemel, R-Franklin.

Another indication was minority Chairwoman Rep. Margo Davidson, D-Delaware, complimenting LaRose for his campaign during the recent election season to encourage voter registration by providing materials to barber shops and hair salons and holding a registration drive with the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball organization, Grove pointed out.

Ohio has strict voter ID requirements, but "they also go out of their way to encourage people to register and go vote," Grove said.

Ohio requires voters to present photo ID, but for those who don't have it, a pay stub, a utility bill or a public assistance payment receipt is acceptable, LaRose said.

If an ID issue arises on Election Day, a voter can cast a provisional ballot, then take as long as 10 days to bring in the necessary ID, he said.

Ohio requires signature verifications to vote, according to LaRose.

But those don't generate frequent rejections -- only several hundred per year statewide -- and rejections are only done in bipartisan fashion, he said.

Ohio purges its voter rolls by law after every federal election, eliminating anyone who has not participated in elections for six years and interacting in no way with the state's electoral machinery, LaRose said. And that has been controversial, he said.

It's controversial, because in addition to getting rid of duplicate names, the names of dead people and the names of people who've departed the state, it also gets rid of the names of those who simply haven't exercised their right to vote.

Ohio recently, however, has tried to mitigate that harm by publishing and widely disseminating its proposed purge list five months before the purge is schedule to happen, breaking the list down by ZIP code and working with the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, churches and both parties to identify people who remain eligible, LaRose said.

That effort "saved" tens of thousands of such names on a list that originally totaled 300,000, LaRose said.

"It's important to safeguard voting rights," he said.

A balance is needed between "integrity and accessibility," Grove said.

There are people who would seek to cheat, even though incidents of voter fraud may be "few and far (between)," he said.

Thus, Pennsylvania needs to ensure its election system "can't be exploited," although "you don't want to make it so onerous" that people are discouraged from voting, he said.

Grove hopes to "dismantle" then "rebuild the electoral system in Pennsylvania.

"If you're a legal voter, you should have every opportunity to vote," Grove said. "At the same time, we need to ensure there's no manipulation."

Another practice that has bolstered voter confidence in Ohio is early pre-canvassing, according to LaRose.

Unlike Pennsylvania, which doesn't allow for pre-canvassing of absentee ballots until 7 a.m. Election Day, Ohio precanvasses them as soon as they arrive at election offices, LaRose said.

A bipartisan team cuts the envelopes open, verifies that the voter has provided proper ID and flattens the ballots for the scanner, according to LaRose. It also scans them, according to the state's elections officials' manual, a copy of which was provided by LaRose's office.

But the votes are not counted -- tabulated -- until after polls close on election day.

Still, because of the preparatory work, the results are available on election night, LaRose said.

The availability of those results precludes a situation like the one that occurred late on the night of the recent election, when then-President Donald Trump, who was leading in Pennsylvania and several other battleground states at the time, claimed victory on that basis, preemptively casting aspersions at the continued counting of mail-in or absentee ballots.

Those were skewing heavily Democratic, because of Trump's having disparaged that voting method and because Democrats tended to be more cautious about in-person voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Pennsylvania, the slow counting of mail-in ballots didn't overcome Trump's large lead and comfortably put current President Joe Biden ahead until Saturday -- a delay that helped fuel Trump's increasingly brazen fiction that he'd won Pennsylvania and other battleground states where there was a similar situation.

That continuing fiction, even after the Trump campaign lost all of about 60 court challenges, eventually culminated in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 by Trump supporters.

County commissioners in Pennsylvania wanted pre-canvassing before Election Day, and House Republicans passed a bill that would have allowed it to begin three days prior, but that provision was linked with other measures that Gov. Tom Wolf's administration regarded as discouraging to voters, and no change was made.

Ohio is liberal on another matter in which Pennsylvania is conservative -- and which similarly proved controversial in the recent election.

Ohio allows mailed absentee ballots to arrive up to 10 days after the election, provided those ballots were mailed no later than Election Day.

That grace period eliminates disenfranchisement due to potential delays in mail service, LaRose said.

The speed of mail service was an issue before the last election when the Trump-appointed postmaster general ordered changes that slowed mail deliveries, leading Democrats to accuse the Trump administration of trying to sabotage the Democratic vote count.

In Pennsylvania, the Wolf administration successfully petitioned the Democratic-majority state Supreme Court to allow mail ballots to count if they arrived up to three days after Election Day -- although a Republican challenge led to those ballots being counted separately.

About 10,000 such ballots were thus segregated, not enough to make a difference in the presidential result, given that Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes.

LaRose has been willing to "steal good ideas from other states," and is likewise happy to share ideas, he said.

All 50 states are "laboratories of democracy," he said.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.