Barack Obama defeated* Mitt Romney by 166,214 votes in Ohio in 2012. That’s out of 5,489,028 votes cast. So Obama’s victory margin was just 3 percent, 50 to 47 over Romney.
But 20% of Ohio’s voters should not be on the rolls at all, according to a story in the Columbus Dispatch.
More than one out of every five registered Ohio voters is probably ineligible to vote.
In two counties, the number of registered voters actually exceeds the voting-age population: Northwestern Ohio’s Wood County shows 109 registered voters for every 100 eligible, while in Lawrence County along the Ohio River it’s a mere 104 registered per 100 eligible.
Another 31 counties show registrations at more than 90 percent of those eligible, a rate regarded as unrealistic by most voting experts. The national average is a little more than 70 percent.
Ohio’s elections chief, Secretary of State Jon Husted, sought help from Attorney General Eric Holder to clean up the state’s roles. You may have guessed how that went, as Husted is a Republican.
In a Feb. 10 letter, he asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for a personal meeting to discuss how to balance seemingly conflicting federal laws so he could pare Ohio’s dirty voter list without removing truly eligible voters.
“Common sense says that the odds of voter fraud increase the longer these ineligible voters are allowed to populate our rolls,” Husted said. “I simply cannot accept that.”
Holder’s office has never replied.
Among the ineligible voters who remain on Ohio’s rolls include 1.8 million dead people and nearly 3 million who have registered to vote in multiple states. Both of these situations are ripe for voter fraud and it just so happens that fraud did occur in the last several Ohio elections, including 2008 and 2012. Obama won both of those.
h/t Human Events
*Maybe. The margin of victory is well within the margin of bogus voters and fraud.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member