In 2012, young voters made up 19 percent of the electorate. Young people including the roughly 700,000 students on Ohio’s college campuses will be an essential voting bloc again in 2016 and will help determine which candidate the swing state elects — if they are given the chance to vote.
Since the last presidential election, Republicans in Ohio have made repeated efforts to make it harder for students in the state to vote, including eliminating early voting and registration periods and enacting others barriers that keep young people, African Americans and Latinos away from the polls. But in advance of the 2016 election, a group of people representing at-risk voting populations filed a new lawsuit on Friday alleging the state’s actions to limit voting violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Of the four named plaintiffs, one, Jordan Isern, is a student at Ohio State University who has been involved with get out the vote and voter registration initiatives on her campus since 2012. The complaint alleges that young people and those who tend to vote Democratic are disproportionately impacted by the restrictive laws, which were intended to help Republican candidates get elected.
The suit also claims that Gov. John Kasich’s (R) elimination of “golden week” — the time when voters can both register and cast a ballot on the same day — and the reduction of other early voting and weekend voting hours have made it substantially harder for certain communities to vote.
“The golden week is very important to students,” Mike Brill, the president of College Democrats of Ohio and the student body president at University of Dayton, told ThinkProgress. “Most of us are not registered to vote and if you want to go register at your campus address, you can just go to the Board of Elections during that week and obviously register to vote and vote at the same time, which makes it very easy, especially as a student if you have limited transportation options.”
Students are often first-time voters who need to register before they can vote, said Ohio state Rep. Kathleen Clyde (D). As a result, the elimination of golden week affects them more than other populations.
“Rather than get rid of what has been an experiment that has largely worked, we should expand it and think about ways to make voter registration easier,” she told ThinkProgress.
Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) has also ordered a number of directives under which counties are no longer able to offer evening early voting hours or weekend early voting more than two weeks before an election. The directives also prevent counties from having more than one early in-person voting location, regardless of their population, and make it harder for people to obtain and cast absentee ballots, among other restrictive laws and procedures.
The limit on early voting centers hurts students whose campuses are not located in or near the county seat — like in Portage County, Clyde’s district, where Kent State University is located almost 6 miles from the early voting center, she said.
Ohio also prohibits student IDs from being used as a valid form of ID to vote. As a result, out-of-state students are required to come up with a different proof of ID in order to cast a ballot. In 2014, Isern, who is originally from California, was forced to use an electronic copy of a utility bill she had on her phone in order to vote, according to the complaint.
Clyde said that cuts to early voting have hurt students, who “often have a difficult time complying with Ohio’s voter ID law.”
“For students who move every year and often have a number of roommates, they may not have something [like a bill] in their name with their campus address where they’re registered,” she said. “They often have a hard time providing the ID they need for Election Day voting, but in Ohio for early voting, you merely need to provide the last four digits of your social security number. That’s an easier standard for them to meet.”
The lawsuit also claims that the wait time at Isern’s on-campus polling location in 2012 was approximately two hours. If her county hadn’t offered a number of early in-person polling locations — an effort that as of now, is prevented for the upcoming election — the lines would have been even longer to accommodate the country’s 800,000 registered voters. In 2004, a Democratic-sponsored survey found that an estimated 174,000 would-be Ohio voters gave up in frustration of long waits at polling centers. Some voters at Kenyon College had to wait for 11 hours before voting.
The 2016 election could prove even worse if efforts aren’t made to make it easier for students to vote, Clyde said.
“There’s a lot of talk out there about students not being the type of people we want voting — they’re renters, they’re irresponsible or lazy — and I just strongly disagree with all that and think they are our future,” she said. “We make a lot of policy decisions in the State House and in Congress that impact their everyday lives and they should be able to have a voice in those matters.”
Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers attempted to sneak a poll tax into the transportation budget. The measure would have required out-of-state students to reregister their vehicles in Ohio before registering to vote. After significant pushback from Clyde and other Democratic lawmakers, Gov. Kasich line-item vetoed the tax out of the budget bill.
Lawmakers made a similar effort to add a provision to the budget in 2013 which would have required universities to grant in-state tuition to students from other states if the students use university documents to vote in Ohio. In the end, the measure was strongly opposed by the universities and was shot down.
Last year, Ohio Republicans also cut the early voting period and eliminated same-day voter registration, although some early voting hours were restored after a lawsuit.
Efforts by republican lawmakers may also exclude other voting groups from the polls as well. Twenty-four GOP members of the House of Representatives cosponsored a bill last week that would require many Ohio residents to pay a fee in order to obtain a photo ID card if they do not have another form of ID in order to vote.
Molly Shack, the civic engagement director of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative — another plaintiff in the recently filed lawsuit -– said the group will continue working to fight all of the restrictive efforts.
“We really want to see things like same day voter registration, online voter registration, automatic voter registration,” Shack, who is also a founding member of the Ohio Student Association, told ThinkProgress. “We’re really tired of seeing the rolling back of hours and abilities for people in Ohio to vote.”