227k Inactive Voters Registered in Franklin County (Ohio)

Columbus Dispatch ^ | 10/24/2004 | Jon Craig

[delapaz]

The Columbus Dispatch - Election

Franklin County has more than 227,000 inactive voters -- about a quarter of the county's registered voters.

Voters are labeled "inactive" once they have failed to vote in two federal-election cycles and don't respond to confirmation cards. Almost 1.9 million of Ohio's more than 8.5 million registered voters haven't cast a ballot since at least 1999, the Dispatch analysis found.

Of course the useful thing here would be to know how many inactive voters we had in 2000, for comparison purposes.

816k -227k = 589k far less than the 682k registered in 2000. But unfortunately of the Year 2000 682k, we don't know how many of those were inactive.

Important information about fraud included in this article.:

Damschroder and Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, said there are procedures in place to assure people don't vote under the names of inactive voters Nov. 2.

"The poll book is the first line of defense," LoParo said.

The books are marked reminding poll workers to ask inactive voters to verbally verify their addresses.

Also, if a signature doesn't match the one on record, poll workers can ask further questions. Ultimately, a voter can be asked to present a driver's license or utility bill to prove residency.

[delapaz]

I see this as overall good news. OH has procedures in place for fraud and the overall voter pool in a critical county for Kerry is much less than anticipated.

[plushaye]

Thanks. It's good to see that Kerry has less of an advantage now in certain OH counties where Gore ran strong in 2000.

[GeronL]

Registering to vote is so simple that everyone, EvERYONE should have to do it every 2 years. IMO

[LS]

Look, guys, this is great news, and it confirms EXACTLY what Jay Cost has been saying: there have been massive population shifts in OH from Blue counties to Red counties and the gist of these shifts is that Ohio has gotten "redder."