Ohio is a closed primary state, with a twist. Unlike some closed primary states, you can change parties on the same day that you vote -- but according to state law, you must pledge support to your new party.
The idea here is to deter voters from one party voting in another's primary purely to muck up the process. For example, since McCain became the de facto GOP nominee in late February, Rush Limbaugh has encouraged Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton to muck up the Democratic primary. In Mississippi, one-quarter of Clinton's voters were Republicans, and while there's some debate over whether Limbaugh was the primary reason for this, there's no debating that a large majority of Hillary's Mississippi Republicans had no intention of voting for her in the general.
Although cross-over vote peaked in Mississippi, it had actually started to ramp up in both Texas and Ohio. In Ohio, for example, nearly 5% of voters were Republicans for Clinton -- up sharply from the 2% up until that point. Presumably, most of these cross-over voters have no intention of voting for Clinton in the general -- just like in Mississippi. In terms of numbers, we're talking about 60-100,000 Republicans in Ohio who voted for Clinton. That's not enough to have changed the statewide result, but it would have impacted the delegate count.
(Obama does get a high number of Republican votes, but he has done so throughout the campaign, and every indication is that those cross-over voters intend to vote for him. Moreover, his numbers haven't gone up since McCain won, whereas Hillary's have.)
This is all a long introduction to note an interesting story in yesterday's Columbus Dispatch, which conducted a statewide survey of counties in Ohio to determine whether or not the cross-over voting rules were applied in uniform fashion. It found that the enforcement was not uniform at all:
A Dispatch review found wide discrepancies from county to county in how so-called crossover voters were treated at the polls on March 4.
Officials in some counties challenged crossover voters on Election Day, but not if they voted absentee.
Others, such as those in Butler County, challenged both. In Mahoning County, challenges were mandatory, but voters still got a ballot even if they refused to sign the form.
Other counties' elections staffers instructed poll workers to challenge, but they suspect the directive was not carried out consistently from voting place to voting place.
There's been talk of prosecuting voters who crossed over purely to muck with the Democratic Party. I'm not a big fan of that idea -- in fact, I think Ohio's law is a bit sketchy. I do think though that on election day, it should have been applied uniformly. It's history now, but it's worth keeping in the back of our minds when the Clinton campaign boasts of Ohio as a tremendous victory.
Then, of course, there's Hillary Clinton's NAFTA lie that helped her seal the deal...
© Jed Lewison