Advisory: New Ohio Report Finds Troubling Racial Disparities in Provisional Ballot Use During 2020 General Election

COLUMBUS ‒ All Voting is Local will host a telephone press briefing at 10 a.m. ET on Thursday, April 29, 2021, to discuss findings from its latest report titled “Too Many Ballots of Last Resort - Disparities in Provisional Ballot Use in Ohio's 2020 Election.” On the call they will urge Ohio’s legislature to expand the early voting options that roughly 3.3 million Ohioans successfully used to cast their ballots during 2020’s General Election.

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Maricopa County’s New Election Director: The Head Chef It Needs, Or Just Another ‘Cook In The Kitchen?’

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors took its biggest step yet in responding to a rocky primary election last August.At its meeting on Wednesday, the board created a new position to oversee Election Day. Now, one person will run early voting and report to the county recorder, and a second person, who reports to both the recorder and the Board, will handle Election Day.

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Business Insider: Pennsylvania’s election is in uncharted territory with a new rule that rejects ‘naked’ ballots

“I don’t think the numbers lie, and the difference now is that the state has gone through almost 10 months of public communication on how to securely submit a mail-in ballot,” Scott Seeborg, the Pennsylvania State Director of advocacy group All Voting is Local, told Insider of Deeley’s estimations. “Extensive public education will move the needle downwards on the number of ‘naked ballots’ even as the total volume increases to more than 20 times the 2019 levels, as we saw in the primary.”

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The National Memo: Ohio Primary Raises New Election Worry: Rejected Provisional Ballots

"We have 1.4 million ballots cast. There are still 500,000 that have not yet been reported back in," said Mike Brickner, Ohio director for AllVotingIsLocal.org, at the Lawyers' Committee briefing on primary day. "There's a lot of concern that many of those ballots may not reach voters in time, and many [voters] do not want to go to the boards of elections today because they have health concerns or other issues."

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The New Yorker: Battling Anxiety Over Making Sure Your Vote Gets Counted

Such funding is certainly needed, though, for, among other things, allowing election administrators to create multiple paths to the ballot box for voters most at risk of being denied access to it. Democrats have rallied this summer to defend mail-in voting against the President’s attacks, and that is necessary, but “the truth is, vote by mail does not work for every voter,” Hannah Fried, the national campaign director for All Voting Is Local, a campaign housed under the Leadership Conference Education Fund, which works to remove barriers to voting, told me. “African-American voters vote by mail at much lower rates than white voters. Native Americans living on tribal land without a standard address or reliable delivery” of mail can’t rely on that means. “We need options,” Fried said, including ballot-return drop boxes and adequate early in-person polling places.

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