A federal appeals court has ruled that Ohioans who were removed for not voting over a six-year period must be allowed to vote in this midterm election.
An appeals court in Cincinnati says voters who were removed from the rolls between 2011 and 2015 may cast provisional ballots, as long as they still live in the county where they were registered and haven’t been disqualified from voting because of felony convictions or other reasons. These are voters who may have been removed or purged before a lawsuit was filed in 2016 challenging Ohio’s voter roll maintenance method, which was upheld by the US Supreme Court in June. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted says he disagrees with this ruling, but won’t appeal it because it doesn’t affect many voters and because of the short timeline till Election Day. There are more than eight million registered voters in Ohio, and no voters have been removed since the Supreme Court decision.
