Ohio Homeless Advocates File Emergency #SCOTUS Petition on OH Absentee/Provisional Voting Rules

You can find the petition here. From the petition:

The Sixth Circuit’s decision left in place only the prohibition on requiring full and accurate completion of two fields (address and birthdate) on the absentee ID envelope. It disregarded the identical issues that occur in the provisional-ballot context—disproportionately cast by minority voters—and in the other three absentee-ID-envelope fields. Thus, under the Sixth Circuit’s ruling, if an absentee voter makes a mistake in the birthdate field, her vote will still count, but if, like Sally Miller mentioned above, for example, she misses one digit in the last four digits of her social-security number (SSN-4), she will be disenfranchised—even where other information on the form (including a matching signature) suffices to verify her identity and eligibility.Similarly, if an absentee voter makes a mistake in the birthdate field, her vote will still count, but a provisional voter (such as Kadar Hiir mentioned above) who makes the same mistake on the provisional affirmation form could be disenfranchised. This is true even though Defendant Secretary of State’s representative himself admitted at trial that the State’s purported voterregistration rationale does not justify the perfect-form requirements for provisional 5 ballots, see Damschroder Tr., R.665, PageID#31049; nor does fraud—the instances of which, he admitted, were “infinitesimal.” See id, at PageID#31051–31052; see also Sixth Circuit Op. at 23, App. A-023 (panel majority acknowledging “there is no indication of a legitimate fraud concern at all”). The Sixth Circuit’s decision is based upon flawed interpretations of constitutional and statutory law. It conflicts with this Court’s precedent and with other circuit courts in the following significant ways that warrant this Court’s consideration….

Aside from the merits, there is a serious question about timing.

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