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Ohio Supreme Court decides ‘distance’ voting case
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: February 12, 2016
The Ohio Supreme Court keeps finding itself making decisions involving technology, whether it wants to or not.
The latest, State ex rel. Holwadel v. Hamilton Cty. Bd. of Elections, Slip Opinion No. 2015-Ohio-5306, involves very interesting, and very modern, issues of distance working/ telecommuting and residential voting requirements.
The court’s timeline includes references to Twitter posts, Facebook posts, emails, and the rest of the ways modern folks track their comings and goings.
And, in this election season, I’m guessing that this case is only the first of many Ohio voter registration cases to come, each probably laid out through reference to social media posts.
The facts: Randy Simes is a professional engineer, originally from Cincinnati, who works as a project supervisor for a multinational corporation. In that position, he travels both within and outside of Ohio and the United States. He is currently in the middle of a multi-year assignment in Seoul, South Korea, which is where he was when he and I Skyped the other day.
Simes, 30, is also the founder, editor and a primary writer for the website UrbanCincy (www.urbancincy.com), a position that he has maintained through his travels, whether or not he was physically located in Cincinnati. UrbanCincy calls itself “the source for news on Cincinnati’s dynamic urban core.”
Seoul is 14 hours ahead of Ohio, which, said Simes, “lets me wake up in the morning after the previous days’ news cycle is over and catch up on everything that happened in Cincinnati overnight.”
Modern Times. But Simes’ publication has apparently made a few enemies through the years as well.
Simes’ work eventually took him from Cincinnati to Chicago where he registered to vote and in fact, voted.
He was then offered the job in Seoul. Rather than going directly to Korea, Simes got rid of his apartment in Chicago and came back to Cincinnati staying at the apartment of his friend and fellow UrbanCincy blogger Travis Estell.
While in Cincy this time, Simes registered to vote, terminating his voter registration in Chicago. He then did vote, and then moved on to Seoul, where he continued to run UrbanCincy (and continues to run the site).
Sime’s Cincinnati voter registration was then challenged by a group of people, whom Simes identified to me as folks who opposed some of his website’s political positions. That group had a history of challenging voter registrations en masse, said Simes, but he said that he thought that this was the first challenge that the group had brought against an individual.
The Hamilton County Board of Elections denied the challenge. The group then brought a writ of mandamus to the 1st District Court of Appeals, where it was denied, the decision that was then upheld by the Ohio Supreme Court.
The plaintiff’s basis of that board of elections challenge was their interpretation of R.C. 3503.01 (A), which states the residential qualifiers for voting in Ohio.
A prospective voter must be a resident of the voting precinct for 30 days prior to the election (not the date of the registration, a key point in the court’s decision). A voter’s residence is defined under the statute as a place where “the person’s habitation is fixed and to which, whenever the person is absent, the person has the intention of returning.”
Evidence submitted by the plaintiffs included Simes’s Chicago voting record, as well as his Twitter and blog posts that they said indicated that Simes had moved directly from Chicago to Korea.
For his part, Simes said that his place of residence was in Cincinnati at Estell’s apartment, that he had registered to vote and had voted in Cincy, and that he intended to return to Cincy when his gig in Seoul was over.
Simes did tell me that he does visit Ohio on occasion.
The plaintiff’s argued in their mandamus action that Simes had never proved his permanent residence was in Cincinnati.
However, the Supreme Court wrote that the plaintiff’s had the issue backwards, stating that the burden of proof did not lie on Simes to prove that he was a Cincinnati resident, but, rather, that the plaintiff, “prove… by clear and convincing evidence that Simes did not meet the statutory requirements to vote.”
It may be easier to vote in Ohio than some think. Even from a distance.
You can read the case here:
http://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/0/2015/2015-Ohio-5306.pdf