Update, 10:55 a.m., PT: Photo ID bill HB 159 was recessed until a substitute bill is drafted. The committee will reconvene at the call of the chair.
Although an Ohio Senate panel dropped a photo ID provision from an omnibus election bill–with the support of the Republican secretary of state, the League of Women Voters, and state Democrats–the controversial issue is still on the table today in a separate bill.
Both photo ID bill HB 159 and omnibus election bill, HB 194 were scheduled for Senate committee hearings this morning. Last night, Project Vote submitted testimony opposing the photo ID measure that “constitutes a direct threat to the voting rights of many of Ohio’s most vulnerable citizens, who, to add insult to injury, would be forced to pay for the implementation of this proposal to the tune of many millions of dollars.”
The omnibus bill, like many proposed in state legislatures across the country, “would reduce the number of early voting days in the state from the current 35-day window,” the Associated Press reported. “Voters would have 21 days to vote by mail and could cast a ballot in person 17 days before Election Day. The legislation also gets rid of a five-day early-voting period in which new voters can register and cast a ballot.”
Senate Republicans say the decision to drop photo ID from the omnibus bill was to “ensure that the numerous other aspects of the bill would not be held up by legal challenges,” the Columbus Dispatch reports.
While Secretary of State Jon Husted opposes photo ID as originally proposed because it doesn’t offer alternatives to prove identity, including Social Security numbers, he does support the omnibus bill, according to the Dispatch. Senate President Tom Niehaus says that the Senate is looking into “letting people without a photo ID provide a full Social Security number” to allow them to cast a provisional ballot.
This raises serious identity-theft issues, says House Speaker William G. Batchelder, R-Medina.
“You don’t have to be a law professor to figure out what’s going on here,” said election law expert, Daniel Tokaji, a professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. “This is a power grab. It is a transparent effort by Republicans to make it more difficult to vote.”
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