Upcoming Events for Voting

NEOCH staff will be going around every week to pick up completed voter registration cards to drop off at the Board of Elections.  We dropped off blank forms this last week to every homeless social service provider in the community.  Many shelters are sending their registrations directly to the Board, but we are helping out some of the big shelters to get these returned in a timely manner.  

In addition, we have the CD of all the registered voters in Cuyahoga County and their voting history.  We can pull out your shelter’s address out of the data and send you a list of everyone registered a shelter address.  This way a shelter staff person could contact them if they know their current address to get them to change their address with the Board of Elections.  If you work at a shelter and want to take on this project send NEOCH an e-mail or call us.

NEOCH, as part of our lawsuit against the State of Ohio, we are looking for low income or homeless people who are having a hard time getting identification, but want to vote in the fall.  We want to talk to people who especially want to vote in person but are born in one of those states that take a very long time to get a birth certificate such as Puerto Rico, New York City, Indiana, California, etc..  Please give these clients our contact information and ask them to get in touch with me.   We want to talk to people without id and who want to vote in person in November.

Finally, OhioVotes a program of the state Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio will have a training session for shelters and service providers in Cleveland on Tuesday September 11 to provide information on early voting, the hours of operation for early voting, Golden Week, and coordination for getting your clients to the polling place.  This training will provide updated information on the current state of the law.  We hope that each shelter can send a staff person to this training. We will send you more information on this in the near future.

Other upcoming dates include:

• National Voter Registration Day is September 25, 2012
• National Homeless Registration Week is September 30 to October 6, 2012
• Golden Week in Ohio is October 2 to October 9, 2012--this is the week in which a person can vote and register at the same time at the main Board of Elections office at the same time.  This could be limited by the attempts by one political party to reduce the number of hours that Board is open in the evening and the weekend.

Brian Davis