In 2022, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative recruited people in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati to serve as “Democracy Builders.” These volunteers agreed to reach out to relatives and friends to remind them about the upcoming election and to encourage them to register to vote if they hadn’t already and to follow through at the ballot box.
The Democracy Builders tracked all of these contacts. OOC later compared the list to voter files like those used by political campaigns and parties to guide their “get out the vote” efforts. (Boards of election share some voter information publicly, but who you vote for remains private.) It turned out that 80% of the eligible Ohio voters contacted by Democracy Builders did not appear in the voter files. Of those who did, 70% were listed with an incorrect phone number or none at all.
This is recounted in “Surfacing Missing Voters,” a report written by researcher Miriam McKinney Gray for the Democracy & Power Innovation Fund. McKinney Gray quoted Prentiss J. Haney, co-executive director at Ohio Organizing Collaborative: “You cannot increase voter turnout for voters you cannot find.”
Ohio is home to approximately 2 million eligible but unregistered voters and another 700,000 registered voters who have sat out at least three federal election cycles, according to “Ohio’s Missing Voters,” a 2023 report from Innovation Ohio Education Fund. Most of them are concentrated in urban counties.
“From the 2018 to 2022 midterms, [overall] turnout in Ohio dropped 3.4 points, largely driven by drops in turnout in urban counties, with turnout in Cuyahoga (Cleveland), Franklin (Columbus) and Hamilton (Cincinnati) counties all seeing 6- to 8-point declines,” the report states.
But why? It’s a complex problem, and flawed databases are just the start.
Voters of color are often inaccurately listed in the databases that campaigns buy for canvassing, and sometimes they’re left off entirely because an algorithm assigned them a low score for voting propensity. McKinney Gray estimates that “almost half of eligible Black and Latino voters [nationwide] won’t be seen or contacted by traditional campaigns.”
This contributes to a cycle: people don’t turn out to vote because no one contacted them, and then, during subsequent election cycles, no one contacts them because they didn’t turn out in the past. This leaves people feeling ignored and even less likely to vote in the future.
OOC and other organizations are finding clever ways around such obstacles, but there are no quick fixes. It’s a multi-faceted dilemma involving both national trends and state actions going back about 15 years.
The trap of ‘voter propensity’
In 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected president, Black voter turnout jumped 27% over 2004, from 12 million to 15 million nationwide. In Ohio the difference was even more pronounced: a 41% increase over 2004.
One element of the Obama campaign, “the sophisticated use of data, technology, and new media,” left a lasting impression on the Democratic Party, according to a case study on Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s voter engagement work written for the Harvard Kennedy School in 2023.
“With new data tools, it was possible, with increasing specificity, to model the likelihood that a registered voter would turn out in each election,” the case study stated. “This estimate was expressed as a ‘voter propensity’ score, an amalgam of the individual’s past record of voting with other information—for example, their demographics and the overall voting rate in their neighborhood.”
In later elections, “financially strapped campaign managers latched onto this targeted approach,” the report continued. “Of course, the uncomfortable flip side of focusing more resources on frequent voters was focusing fewer resources on infrequent voters, [who are] overwhelmingly people of color, people with limited financial resources, renters who moved frequently, and young people.”
An advisor to OOC described the trend as “political redlining.”
McKinney Gray’s work explains the problem in detail. It starts with the official voter registration records kept by counties and states. Some of the information in these files, like addresses, may be out of date. In her report, McKinney Gray cites studies and experiments showing that flaws are more common in the files of voters of color.
The problem is exacerbated, she said, when states delete people from the voter records for skipping previous elections, as Ohio did this summer. (When Ohio did this in 2019, voter advocacy groups found that approximately 40,000 people appeared on the purge list in error.)
Mistakes and gaps in the voter files hamper the work of organizations like OOC.
“It is difficult to get a clear picture of the community an organization wishes to organize without reliable data,” McKinney Gray writes. “Organizations have to work twice as hard to (only possibly) reach those invisible people.”
Voter propensity scores — calculated by companies who buy voter files and combine them with other data sets to create voter contact lists for political parties and campaigns — further contribute to the problem.
“A voter propensity score is often used as a ‘threshold’ or arbitrary cut-off point by campaigns to determine whom to contact and whom to skip over in voter engagement programs,” McKinney Gray explained.
And the cycle continues.
“With traditional voter-file-based contact methods alone, we will never be able to reach a person who was invisible to begin with. This is the paradox of the invisibilized.”
🗳️For more on this year’s November election, visit our Election Signals 2024 page.
Ohio voters face more obstacles
Republicans responded very differently to Obama’s electoral success, according to the authors of the Harvard Kennedy School case study.
“Republican-controlled states, alleging vast (but unproven) improprieties in voting, began enacting a host of restrictions that effectively made it harder for everyone to vote—but especially students, people of color, people juggling multiple jobs and family responsibilities, people without cars or flexible transportation, etc.,” the study’s authors wrote.
“These included requiring government IDs at the polls; scaling back on conveniences (same-day registration, early voting, weekend voting, ballot drop boxes, vote-by-mail); and purging the voter rolls, not just when a voter moved or died, but also when they had missed voting in two or more election cycles.”
Ohio has embraced all of these and more, according to Innovation Ohio. According to the organization’s 2024 report, “Missing Voters: Part 2”:
• Ohio is one of only 10 states with a strict photo identification requirement. It has the most restricted list of allowed forms of ID and the fewest alternatives (such as signing an affidavit, as Michigan allows).
• Ohio is one of just five states that restrict the number of ballot dropboxes to one per county.
• Ohio is one of several states to “purge” voters from registration lists for not voting and is one of only two states to do so after a voter has missed just two elections.
“On metric after metric, Ohio stands in the minority of states that have [added] more barriers to voting,” the report states. “This correlates with Ohio consistently having the lowest voter turnout among similar states.”
Finding solutions
In 2021, Greater Cleveland Congregations, an interfaith coalition, launched its “Battle for Democracy,” a 10-year effort to increase voter participation in the Cleveland wards and inner-ring suburbs where it has dropped the most. GCC quickly started working with the Union of Concerned Scientists on overcoming the shortcomings with available voter lists. Organizers often find that the contact information is accurate for only about 30% of the people on them.
But the efforts are paying off.
“The 2022 turnout rate among those who were contacted and committed to voting was 56%, compared with an overall turnout rate of 30% for the City of Cleveland,” UCS reported last year. In Ward 5, overall turnout was 15%, but it was 42% among those who promised a GCC organizer that they would vote.
After exposing the flaws in voter lists, Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s Democracy Builders came through, making 28,000 contacts with friends and family, according to McKinney Gray’s report.
“If we want to bring missing voters into community and long-term civic engagement with others,” she writes, “it starts with base-building organizing groups.”
Join Signal Cleveland and City Club of Cleveland for a panel discussion on “The Forgotten Voter” on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 7:30 p.m. at The Happy Dog, 5801 Detroit Ave., Cleveland.