Op-ed: Voting rights are under fire in Ohio. Casting a ballot is how you fight back.
By Tom Lopach
Ohio voters are heading to the polls this November amid a wave of coordinated efforts to sow doubt about the very organizations that help eligible Americans register to vote and turn out to vote.
At a moment when voters deserve clear, accurate information about how to participate in our democracy, they are instead being met with efforts to intimidate and confuse them.
Recent actions by state and federal officials have cast an unwarranted shadow over decades of nonpartisan voter registration work, in an attempt to create a climate that risks discouraging eligible Ohioans from exercising one of their most fundamental rights.
Just weeks ago, more than 100 FBI agents raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative (OOC), a nonprofit that has spent nearly two decades helping register eligible Ohioans. Agents searched employees’ homes and questioned staff for hours, with insufficient public explanation for the raid.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose recently warned voters to be suspicious of voter registration groups like OOC — and mine, the Voter Participation Center (VPC) and Center for Voter Information (CVI). He falsely claimed these organizations don’t actually help unregistered voters and urged Ohioans to ignore our mailers.
Not all outside mail is the same. Legitimate voter registration groups, including VPC and CVI, use the same official forms as state election officials. We also share our materials with election officials in advance.
We’ve worked closely over the years with Ohio election administrators who are entrusted to run free and fair elections. Bad actors don’t do that.
There’s a broader context for Ohioans: the same secretary of state who’s raising alarms about voter registration groups is the one who handed the personal information of eight million Ohio voters over to the Trump administration’s Justice Department.
The state official warning Ohioans not to trust groups that help them register is also cooperating with a federal government building lists of voters and intimidating the organizations that reach them.
With the midterms just months away, Ohioans are being hit with misinformation from multiple directions. No matter the source, the message lands the same way — don’t trust the mail, don’t answer the door, don’t bother casting a ballot.
This confusion is designed to do one thing: keep eligible voters from turning out.