Thursday, November 04, 2004
Franklin County, Ohio has tens of thousands of absentee ballots to count
Franklin County, Ohio is where Columbus [pop 711,470] is which the home of Ohio State University. Because of the large student body there are lots of absentee ballots. I worked for the voter outreach to young voters and students via
VoteMob and
Downtown for Democracy (D4D) for a few days last week and I worked with data from new registration records. Move On and numerous election protection organizations and local organizations were doing similar work with their own staff and volunteers.
Readers should know that last Sunday the Columbus Dispatch reported huge numbers, the largest amount in Ohio electoral history had been submitted.
See 53,000 seek absentee ballots.
The elections board had issued about 53,000 applications for absentee ballots as of Friday, said Matthew Damschroder, board of elections director.
That eclipses the previous record of about 30,000 applications issued in the 2000 election, he said.
Ohio allows these ballots up to the last minute and they have easy to use
internet tools to download forms. The last day to submit an absentee ballot was noon Oct. 30th.
As students often move and sometimes vote using their parents address and not their dormitory or other housing many choose to ensure their vote counts by submitting and absentee ballot. The young voters had great outreach by the local and out of state volunteers. There were extra efforts to contact them individually to dispel voting procedure lies being spread by flyer and other means by Republican operatives. Student voter dissuasion tactics including telling potential voters they would loose their student insurance if they put an address on the ballot that didn't match the insurance records. The lie campaign varied from the clever, varied and convincing or plain pathetic. However, thanks to us the rumors were quickly corrected. I cannot stress how many Vote Mob/D4D people were there to do this. As I left Saturday many from our bus stayed on and twice our busload were arriving from New York to replace us.
Provisional ballots were available at each polling place in case of new address problems etc.. Voters were not just sent home if they went to their nearest polling place but records showed their less recent address. Many students move more than once a year and there will be many provisional ballots (ballots filled out on election day but in need of qualification). Republicans planned to place operatives in big numbers in each polling place to challenge provisional ballots as they know large votes equals a Kerry victory. The Ohio judiciary quashed this scheme in advance so these ballots should not have been interfered with. The mobility of the students in this college town should not prohibit them from voting and it did not hinder outreach efforts to urge them to vote.
The Ohio newspapers and news media did a great job of pointing out all different voting methods since the Republicans wanted to nix the provisionals. The local news media made extra efforts to explain the ballot choices in the last days of the campaign.
The Ohio ballot includes an anti-gay marriage proposal which energized the gay and lesbian community to work extra hard on the election.
There is good new information on the status of the Ohio vote count from
the Cleveland Plain Dealer blog.
I predict Franklin County will carry Kerry-Edwards by a good number of absentee and provisional votes.
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