MXO Entertainment: Voting Rights Group Says Ohio’s Election Participation May Be Half Of 2016!

Voting rights group All Voting Is Local says 1.5 million Ohioans have requested absentee ballots so far this year – about half the number who voted in the last presidential primary four years ago. “In 2016, we had a little over 3 million people who voted in the primary election,” says spokesman Mike Brickner. “For the 2020 election thus far, we are looking at about only 1.5 million people who have either cast an early ballot or requested an absentee ballot since we extended the time.

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The Marshall Project: The 470,000 Potential Voters Most Likely To Be Disenfranchised Next Election

Mike Brickner, the Ohio state director of All Voting Is Local, an advocacy group run by The Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights, fears that “we could end up back where we were before 2016, when few to no people in jail had a practical right to vote.” Before the pandemic, he said, the administrators of the Cuyahoga County Jail in Cleveland had been very open to expanding ballot access to people behind bars there, seeing it as a way to remind them that they are still part of the social contract even while awaiting trial.

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Talking Points Memo: Vote-By-Mail, Critical In Pandemic, Poses Risks For Voters Of Color

“For communities — and this is true for African American voters — that have higher rates of moving and lower rates of voter-by-mail usage, [election officials] need to be figuring out how to reach voters, and not looking for ways to, frankly, cut corners and in turn cut people out of the process,” said Hannah Fried, the national campaign director of the advocacy group All Voting Is Local.

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