County boards of elections in Ohio will begin investigating about 200,000 voter records as early as Friday to clear up registration discrepancies.
These discrepancies resulted from voter identification information not matching the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles and Social Security Administration databases.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner would have to make all records of mismatched voter registrations available to county boards of elections. This only applies to any discrepancies among the 665,949 voters who registered or changed their registration since Jan. 1, 2008.
The office has until Friday to create a way of making them available.
The number of discrepancies in Athens County is unknown at this time. In Athens County, 5,284 people registered to vote or changed their voter registration since the beginning of the year.
The county boards of elections will then work to fix the discrepancies and contact voters when necessary, said Kevin Kidder, Ohio Secretary of State Media Relations coordinator.
A mismatch on its own is not enough to knock you off the voter roles
he said.
A mismatch can be a typographical error, such as writing drive instead of lane in an address or change of address, Kidder said.
A majority of the flagged voter records are going to be data entry errors, said Daniel P. Tokaji, the associate director of the Michael E. Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University, in an interview Tuesday.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 requires the state to track such mismatches, and the court's ruling clarified that the secretary of state does need to make the mismatches available to local boards of election, according to court documents.
A mismatch that she does not track down and that she does not allow the county boards of election meaningfully to track down is not a usable mismatch wrote Circuit Court Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton in the nine-judge majority ruling. Six judges dissented.
The secretary of state's office had announced hours before the court ruling that they would improve the statewide voter registration database to avoid these discrepancies, according to a news release.
It is our position that everything is (Help America Vote Act) compliant and this is going an extra step
making it available to boards
he said.
Any voters concerned about their status should contact their county board of election once the secretary of state's office has provided access to the database of mismatched voter registrations, Kidder said.
17
Archives
Rebecca Black
