As he spoke Wednesday to more than 500 elections officials from across Ohio, Secretary of State Jon Husted sounded a bit like a school teacher giving students an assignment for the summer.
But this was no mere summer reading assignment.
Husted, speaking to the Ohio Elections Officials Summer Conference, sought their help to renew his push for Ohio to adopt online voter registration, an improvement he says will make voting more accessible, more secure against fraud and cheaper for county elections boards to manage.
“I have a summer project for you,” Husted told the gathering, “and I hope you will be more excited about it than the workbook I got my 6-year-old daughter to work on during break.
“I want each of you to reach out to your state representatives and state senators of both parties and ask them to pass online voter registration,” he said.
Ohio, as “the most important swing state in the nation,” needs to be a leader in improving the voting systems, Husted said. But on this issue, 19 other states already have some form of online registration.
Husted has pushed for online registration before. But while it made it into various pieces of legislation, it never was enacted, even though there is bipartisan support for the idea.
“For three years we’ve been trying to get this done,” he said. “Why do we spend so much time arguing about the things we don’t agree on and why don’t we spend more time doing the things that we do agree on?”
Husted cited Arizona’s experience to tout his case for Ohio. That state enacted online registration in 2002. A 2010 study by the Pew Research Center found that by then 70 percent of all voter registration was done online.
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