A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit from left-leaning groups challenging a Republican-backed Ohio law requiring voters to show ID at the polls and altering the state’s early-voting times, among other changes.
U.S. District Judge Donald Nugent on Monday granted requests by Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s office and the Ohio Republican Party, among others, to grant summary judgment against the plaintiffs in the case, which included the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, the Ohio Federation of Teachers, the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans and the Union Veterans Council.
Their lawsuit, filed a year ago Tuesday in the Northern District of Ohio, claimed the voting changes in House Bill 458 would unconstitutionally disenfranchise younger voters, senior citizens, Black voters and military members. The groups also argued that the changes serve no legitimate purpose, given how rare voter fraud is in the state.
Those changes included no longer allowing voters to prove their identity to pollworkers by showing a bank statement, paycheck, or other forms of ID that don’t display their photo. HB458 also permits county boards of elections to set up only a single drop box for completed absentee ballots, eliminated the day of early, in-person voting the day before Election Day, and moved up the deadline to apply for an absentee ballot from three days before Election Day to seven days, among other alterations.
In separate filings, lawyers for the Ohio secretary of state and Ohio Republican Party argued that HB458 only made “minor” and “common-sense” changes to the state’s voting rules.
“HB 458 at most requires only a tiny fraction of Ohio voters to modify their voting behavior—and imposes nothing more than minimal burdens to do so,” the Ohio GOP’s motion for summary judgment stated. The motion also asserted that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit “failed to identify even a single voter who was prevented from—or even impeded in—voting in” statewide elections held in May and August last year.
Nugent, in a 46-page opinion Monday, agreed.
“With all of the options universally available to all Ohio voters to register to vote or vote with an array of photo-IDs, or to register to vote or vote without a photo-ID, after passage of HB 458, it is difficult to imagine how the photo-ID voter identification provisions of HB 458 impose anything more that a minimal ‘burden’ on any Ohio voter,” Nugent wrote….