Richard Topper is a trial attorney with 40 years experience and has testified before the Ohio Legislature on civil justice and redistricting issues.
Newly minted Republican secretary of state candidate Robert Sprague wants to take away your right to vote by mail and make it difficult for those who meet his qualifications.
This ill-advised policy will affect hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens. The policy will also put a costly strain on Election Day voting and impact the 32,000 bipartisan pillars of democracy who work the polls.
Let me tell you about a voting location manager and her 24-person bipartisan team with whom I worked.
The team arrives at the polling location at 5:30 a.m. on Election Day. The month before, they completed six hours of in-person and online training. The night before, they worked three hours arranging the voting location to open the polls at 6:30 AM sharp.
The team stays until the last voter in line at 7:30 p.m. casts their ballot. The polling place manager and her opposite-party counterpart end their day at 9:30 p.m. when they deliver the voted ballots to the board of elections. Board of elections employees and poll workers are to be congratulated for a job well done, not burdened by an end to vote-by-mail.
Ohio Republicans fought for what Sprague wants to erase
Before mail-voting by choice, Election Day didn’t always go smoothly. In the 2004 presidential election, voters waited in lines forever. At Kenyon College, lines were 11 hours long. One polling location stayed open until 1:00 am.
In Franklin County, some voters waited 5 hours in the rain. Those with childcare and employment issues left their lines and didn’t vote. A study found that statewide, 3% of Ohioans left the long lines. Imagine the effect of that on a close election.
To alleviate the 2004 issues and take the pressure off Election Day voters and poll workers, Republican lawmakers introduced and passed a bill establishing absentee voting by choice. They succeeded.
Vote-by-mail is popular
The number of absentee-by-mail voters increased by over 1.8 million from 2004 to 2020. And despite Donald Trump and now Sprague disparaging vote-by-mail, in 2024, 914,752 Ohioans, Republicans included, cast their ballot by mail.
In seeking to ban vote-by-mail by choice and making it more difficult for those few who are eligible to vote by mail, Sprague alleges fraud and misrepresents facts by airing and starring in juvenile campaign ads using ridiculous cartoon characters at voting booths.
Claiming voter fraud, Sprague wants to make those who vote by mail place a copy of their photo ID in the vote-by-mail envelope.
Sprague and the buffoonery
This is something Republican lawmakers previously rejected because of the hardship on senior citizens.
What Sprague leaves out of his ads are the safeguards already in place for secure drop boxes and mail-in voting.
“Ohio has the right checks and balances in place to keep mail-in voting accountable, but other states don’t,” Ben Kindel, a spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, said in March.
Recognizing the security of vote-by-mail, even LaRose requested a vote-by-mail ballot.
As a state representative, Sprague twice voted to keep vote-by-mail as it presently stands. It wasn’t until he started acting like an election-denying politician with buffoonish ads that he pushed a ban on vote-by-mail.
In his most ridiculous argument for banning mail voting, Candidate Sprague rhetorically asks, “We didn’t disenfranchise anybody before 2005, did we?” Was Sprague out of state in 2024?
Sprague also fails to consider the cost to taxpayers for additional polling locations, voting machines, and poll workers brought about by forcing hundreds of thousands of mail ballot voters to vote in person on Election Day.
Sprague’s push to ban vote-by-mail, claiming election fraud when little if any exists shows he has no empathy for Ohioans who rely on this method for voting. It shows he has no appreciation for voters who vote and poll workers’ who work on Election Day.
If he continues to push legislation like this, he does not deserve to be Ohio’s secretary of state.
Richard Topper is a trial attorney with 40 years experience and has testified before the Ohio Legislature on civil justice and redistricting issues. He is committed to Ohioan’s right to vote and has volunteered in voter protection efforts (for the Ohio Democratic Party) since 2004.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Secretary of state candidate’s anti-voting crusade is straight up buffoonery | Opinion
Reporting by Richard Topper, Guest Columnist / The Columbus Dispatch
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