Board wants Faber's support for online voter registration

CELINA - County officials hope to persuade their empowered hometown state senator to support adoption of a statewide online voter registration system.

Mercer County Board of Election members Tuesday afternoon instructed directors Deb Sneddon and Laura Bruns to invite Senate President Keith Faber, R-Celina, to attend a future meeting to discuss the benefits of online registration, a proposal long supported by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted.

Ohioans currently register to vote by filling out a form and mailing it or dropping it off at their county board of elections. Registered voters can update their address online at www.sos.state.oh.us.

Twenty states, according to Bruns, have an online voter registration system. She said an Arizona study determined it costs boards of elections 83 cents to process a paper voter registration compared with 3 cents per online registration.

"It's highly efficient, can be optimized for mobile devices, which I thought was interesting. It's more secure, (has) greater integrity and voters nowadays are preferring it, and it's more accurate," Bruns said.

It also eliminates the difficulty of trying to decipher handwriting on the forms, Sneddon added.

"Well, if it increases actual people voting, I think it would be a good thing," board member Bill Sell said.

Sell said the General Assembly has been blocking the proposal.

"I think it's actually the state Senate (which) will not listen to online registration," he said.

Husted at a recent Ohio Association of Election Officials Winter Conference in Columbus touted the benefits of online voter registration. He said it offers better voter rolls, which he said helps to decrease wait times at polls, improves security, ensures fewer provisional ballots and reduces the number of unreturned ballots.

"It's just common sense," Husted said. "This is law-and-order government. This is customer-service government. This saves money for taxpayers. This is reform and modernization."

Husted said half of all U.S. voters have access to online voter registration, an area of elections administration in which Ohio trails.

"I think Ohio is trying to catch up with technology," said Sneddon, who attended the winter conference. "Secretary Husted mentioned that if Ohio would have had an online voter registration we would have been like a gold star state as far as election administration, but we did 12 points in that process."

Board members want to show Faber in person how voter registration transpires and discuss with him the purported merits of switching to online registration.

"I'd like to find out what the General Assembly's objection is to it," Sell said. "I mean we've had electronic direct deposit for paychecks for 20 years. Forty percent of the states already have (online voter registration). I don't know why the holdup is in Ohio."

Bruns and Sneddon also on Tuesday gave board members a report from the November general election.

"Many changes were in effect for this election, including a shortened early voting period, mandatory early voting hours set by the Ohio Secretary of State and the statewide mailing of absentee applications beginning in September," the report stated.

Overall voter turnout in Mercer County was lower than expected, for 42.4 percent of registered voters cast a ballot, compared with 57 percent at the last gubernatorial election in 2010.

"The majority of voters (75 percent) still opt to cast their ballot in person at the polls, compared to 80 percent in 2010 when no absentee application mailing took place," the report noted.

Marion East precinct had the highest voter turnout at 55.18 percent; Celina E had the lowest at 26.19 percent.

Of the 2,992 absentee ballots cast early, 77.7 percent were cast on paper and 22.3 percent by machine in person at the board office, according to the report.

"This increase in mail voters is largely due to the statewide mailing of absentee voting applications by the Ohio Secretary of Sate," the report stated.

The report also stated that 132 of the 141 provisional ballots - issued on Election Day for possible problematic votes such as when names or addresses provided don't correlate with registered voter data - were determined eligible for counting.

"The majority of those ballots were cast provisionally due to a change in address, either within the county or from other counties in Ohio," the report stated.