After a week of threats from Republican Party officials to make mailing absentee ballot applications more difficult in Ohio, Cuyahoga County Executive and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ed FitzGerald appeared on MSNBC to discuss his role in making voting easier for Ohioans in 2014 and 2012 – as well as the relevance of new voter suppression laws for the 2016 presidential election.
Yesterday, Ohio Statehouse Republicans passed an amendment to penalize any Ohio county that mails absentee ballots to their residents by cutting their local government funding by 10 percent. In defense of the amendment which leverages funds for police and public schools to enforce voter suppression laws, a GOP spokesman made the following comparison:
Democratic gubernatorial candidate and Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald released the following statement on the Ohio House GOP’s amendment to the Mid-Biennium Review that would cut local government funds by ten percent for any county that mailed out absentee ballots to their residents.
By JULIE CARR SMYTH | Associated Press
State attorney general candidate David Pepper said on Monday he would make advocating for voter rights a priority if elected this fall and criticized incumbent Mike DeWine for his record on election law issues.
Pepper, a Cincinnati Democrat, said DeWine, a Greene County Republican, has repeatedly defended state-passed election laws that were found unconstitutional or blocked by the courts, including those addressing early voting hours, provisional ballot handling and third-party ballot access.
Today, Nina Turner, Democratic candidate for Ohio Secretary of State, issued the following statement in response to Secretary of State Jon Husted’s opposition to the extension of a 2010 consent decree that allows voters to use the last four digits of the Social Security Number as identification to cast a ballot.
