Filed under the "Maybe it's Nothing, Maybe it's Something" department:
I registered to vote in my current jurisdiction in late September. I went into the polls today to cast my vote, and was told I'd need to cast a provisional ballot because I was not listed on the voter rolls.
I started getting upset, and the poll judge took me aside, and let me use his phone (I'd not brought mine in) to call the Board of Elections, who duly informed me that my registration, dated 25th September, had been overridden on 1st October by my having been "merged" into the list for the county in which I formerly resided.....three years ago.
The lady at the local Board of Elections launched into a lengthy explanation about how it was a "clerical error" that was clearly incorrect, and they were only trying to ensure that each voter was registered in only one place at one time, and that my vote would most definitely be counted.
The lady at the Board of Elections could not tell me by what criteria such "merged" voters were identified, nor by what criteria they were "merged"; she was only insistent that it was a clerical error of little consequence.
But here's the thing that makes my whiskers twitch: that county I resided in three years ago? Massively Democratic. College town. The one I live in now? Massively Republican. Rural. Oh, and ALSO: I personally gave the local Republican buddy-huddle one hell of a bloody nose some years back. (Long story, looking forward to telling it here sometime.)
So combine that with a "glitch" that should, if anything, have worked the other way (meaning: my subsequent registration should have overridden my earlier one, from a systems perspective) with the political angle, and it makes me rather credulous at the explanation I was given.
Anyone hearing anything else like this out of Ohio, or anywhere else? Can anyone give me a perfectly logical reason why this "change" would have occurred in the manner described? And if not, with whom should I follow this up?