Ruth Colker, a law professor at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, has documented her efforts to have her absentee ballot there counted, after records erroneously showed a "mismatch" between the year of her birth in the records and her actual birth year.
The error -- which Colker corrected ten years ago -- dates back to when she first moved to Ohio in 1997 and registered to vote via the motor voter law. When she discovered a year later that motor vehicle records showed her year of birth as 1958 instead of 1956, she immediately corrected the error. Colker didn't know that motor vehicles officials would not also correct the error with elections officials, but no matter. She voted without incident for ten years.
Franklin County, where Colker lives, allows early voters to check the status of their ballots online, to determine whether their ballots have been accepted. Which, in Colker's case, led to her 62-hour saga to convince election officials to count her vote.
Obviously, not everyone is a constitutional law professor or as dogged as Colker, so her story truly makes you wonder how many people's votes won't be counted as a result of errors, which shouldn't keep someone from voting in the first place.
The same paper ballots and procedures were used for early voting in Ohio; in other words, even if you live in a county with electronic voting, if you went to vote early before today, you had to use a paper ballot, just like an absentee ballot.
--Sarah Posner
