This is what Republican moderation looks like in 2019: releasing a list of 235,000 voters, 40,000 of whom shouldn’t be on the list at all, a month before they were to be purged from the Ohio voting rolls. That’s moderate by today’s standards because the public release of those names enabled advocacy groups and activists to figure out that nearly one in five of the people on the list shouldn’t have been there. Most Republicans wouldn’t offer any chance to fix their “mistakes.”
The Ohio secretary of state’s office had flagged 235,000 names as belonging to people who had died or moved or were inactive voters eligible to be purged (thanks, Supreme Court!), but first officials sent a spreadsheet to groups like the League of Women Voters and the A. Philip Randolph Institute. In the process, the director of the Ohio League of Women Voters discovered that she had been flagged as an inactive voter and was slated to be purged. She had voted three times in the previous year.
The mistakes include 20,000 active voters in a heavily Democratic county who were set to be knocked out as inactive. That was discovered by Steve Tingley-Hock, a volunteer who runs the Ohio Voter Project. He discovered thousands of people who shouldn’t be purged just by running the state’s purge spreadsheet against his own database of state voter data. “It’s a simple query if you have a database management system,” he told The New York Times. “A guy at his dining room table can figure this stuff out. It’s not rocket science.” And yet somehow the Ohio secretary of state’s office and county election officials had failed to do so.
”I hope that other states don’t look at what we’ve done and say, ‘We’re not doing it,’” said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. Which … other Republican-controlled states already weren’t doing it, but it’s a safe bet that once Republicans in places like North Carolina and Florida realize that Ohio lost a chance to knock out a whole bunch of active voters in a blue county, they will be especially determined not to repeat that mistake.