The Independent View: Federal Judge Orders Ohio to Undo Cuts to Early Voting

A federal judge, Peter C. Economus, on Thursday blocked Ohio’s cuts to early voting and ordered the state to establish additional polling days before November’s elections, saying the reductions would disproportionately harm the poor and members of minority groups.

Judge Economus’s ruling directed Ohio to restore early voting during evenings and on at least two Sundays, and to reinstate Golden Week, the first week of early voting in which many African-American churches organize congregants to register and vote on the same day. Gov. Kasich and his supporters have said the measures were needed to reduce fraud, save money and create uniformity of practice across the state, and that the four-week early voting period allowed sufficient time for people to cast ballots.

A spokesman for the state attorney general, Mike DeWine, said the state would review the ruling before deciding whether to appeal.

The United States Justice Department filed a statement of interest in the case and has challenged similar measures elsewhere, including in North Carolina.

The ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the Ohio Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., several African-American churches and the League of Women Voters of Ohio.

“This ruling means that thousands of voters who have needed these particular early voting opportunities will continue to have that right,” said Dale Ho, director of the A.C.L.U.’s Voting Rights Project.

Judge Economus wrote that the state’s measures violated both the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act by creating unlawful barriers to the polls for minorities and the poor. The state’s arguments about reducing fraud, according to the judge, “did not withstand logical scrutiny.”

The ruling cited a study of early voting in Cuyahoga County, the greater Cleveland area, in 2008 that found that African-American voters were more than 26 times more likely to have cast ballots during the early voting period than white voters.

“Despite accounting for a mere 28.6 percent of the estimated overall vote, African-American voters cast an estimated 77.9 percent of all” early votes in the county that year, the ruling said. A second study cited by Judge Economus found that early voters who were white, African-American or Latino had lower incomes than those who cast ballots on Election Day or by mail.

The ruling said that restricting Sunday voting would have a similar effect because many of those early voters were African-Americans who voted after attending church services as part of a “Souls to the Polls” initiative.

Voting by mail, the judge wrote, would not relieve the reduced access to voting sites because “the record is undisputed that African-Americans, lower-income individuals, and the homeless are distrustful of the mail and/or voting by mail.”