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Ohio election officials are planning to move ahead with an effort to remove more than 200,000 voters from the rolls.
Ohio rolls getting purged of 235K voters, despite errors
Ohio election officials are scheduled to cancel the voter registrations of 235,000 people on Friday, despite repeated discoveries of errors in the voter database.
Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose has compiled a list of registered voters to be purged unless the people in question take action. Since then, voting rights groups have been digging into the data files and finding errors.
Both the Huffington Post and Columbus Dispatch have reported on multiple cases of errors, totaling tens of thousands of voters. While many were not directly tied to the purge list, advocates argue these errors demonstrate a bigger problem with the voter registration system and the list cleanse needs to be stopped.
"We do not think that the state should be removing any voter from the voter rolls until we first get a handle on the accuracy of our voter registration system," said Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, told the Dispatch. "These reg systems should be beyond reproach. We should be 100 percent guaranteed that these registration rolls are right and there cannot be inconsistencies between county and state voter rolls. The public deserves to know that maintenance is done correctly."
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Ballot measures are good democracy — but only if you can understand them
Marginal improvements have been made to help voters understand the questions posed to them on the ballot this November, a new study concludes, but such ballot measures still favor the college-educated — who represent a minority of the U.S. population.
This year voters in eight states will decide the fate of a collective 36 such propositions. In a study released Thursday, Ballotpedia assessed how easy it is to comprehend what each proposal would accomplish, concluding that the difficulty level had decreased compared with the referendums decided in the last off-year election of 2017 — but not by much.
In fact, according to a pair of well-established tests, 21 of the 36 ballot measures cannot be understood by the 40 percent of the voting-age population who never attended college.
Two states asking Supreme Court for permission to regulate Electoral College conduct
Colorado has become the second state to ask the Supreme Court to decide if states may legally bind their presidential electors to vote for the candidate who carried their state.
The issue of so-called faithless electors is the latest aspect of an increasingly heated debate about the virtues and flaws of the Electoral College that has blossomed, especially among progressive democracy reform advocates, now that two of the past five presidential winners (Donald Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000) got to the Oval Office despite losing the national popular vote.