Will Foreclosures Skew the Vote?
In Ohio, election officials say that there is a growing concern that the state's mortgage foreclosure epidemic will affect the elections this November. The problem lies in the fact that many people who have lost their homes in foreclosures are voters that are still registered to vote at their former addresses that may be in a different jurisdiction than where they currently reside.
CBS News reported that Ohio voters who have not updated their addresses could have problems when trying to vote and may have to bounce around to multiple polling locations in order to cast their votes. Voters in this pivotal state who have been relocated due to bank foreclosure are also more likely to cast provisional ballots that may not even be counted.
An Ohio State University law professor who specializes in elections says that foreclosure and displaced voters have become a major issue this year. Daniel Tokaji told CBS News that he wonders if foreclosures were to blame for the increasing percentages of provisional votes that were cast between 2004 and the presidential primary in March, which was Ohio's most recent election.
In the 2004 presidential election, Ohio voters provided President Bush with an 118,000-vote victory, which gave him the electoral votes he needed to defeat John Kerry and be re-elected as president for four more years.
In Columbus, Ohio, there are almost 3,700 voters that are registered with home addresses which the city lists as vacant properties, according to records kept by the city's code-enforcement office and the Franklin County Board of Elections. However, the Columbia Dispatch reported that the number of displaced voters is much higher than the data on vacant properties suggests. In January, the Franklin County Board of Elections sent notices to approximately 27,000 county residents who had filed change-of-address forms but had not yet updated their voter registrations.
By the end of May, only about 10,000 of the voters had responded to the notices. However, deputy elections director Matthew Damschroder said that partly accounted for a 25 percent increase in new voter registrations and address changes as compared with 2004.
Voters are responsible for keeping their own voter registrations updated with current information. The county is sent regular updates from health boards so that deceased people can be removed from the voter rolls. Voters who are alive and registered to vote but do not vote for more than eight years are also removed from the voter rolls in Franklin County. Other than those updates and removals, the county government does not update the information on voter registrations.
Ohio voters are required to show a current and valid form of identification at the polls. This makes it even more crucial that they keep their voter registrations up to date with correct information. If a voter who has moved due to foreclosure or any other reason has not updated the change of address on their voter registration, casting a vote may be problematic.
Among U.S. cities, Columbus ranked 32nd in the number of home foreclosure filings during the first quarter of 2008, according to foreclosure data collected by RealtyTrac. Other Ohio cities such as Cleveland, Dayton, Akron, Toledo and Cincinnati were also ranked in the top 50 foreclosure cities in the country. Ohio ranked ninth among states with the highest foreclosure rates in the country for May, with one foreclosure filing per 410 homes.
Other key states in the presidential election are also being ravaged by foreclosures. During May, Nevada had the highest rate of foreclosure in the country with one foreclosure filing per 118 homes. Florida ranked fourth in foreclosure filings during May, Michigan was fifth, Georgia was sixth, Colorado was seventh and New Jersey ranked 10th.
If voters who have been forced to move due to foreclosure do not update their voter registrations with current information before the elections, many issues could result, including pre-election challenges by political parties and an overall inaccurate vote count in many key states.
