You filled out your absentee ballot and put it in the mail. You assumed it would be postmarked and arrive at the elections board in time to be counted.

For nearly 900 voters in Summit County, that assumption was wrong.

Ohio voters will gain greater access to the ballot in a settlement announced today by the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Ohio. The agreement with Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted stems from a federal lawsuit filed last year by the ACLU that challenged Ohio’s attempt to slash early voting opportunities.

Follow the reasoning of Jon Husted, the secretary of state, and his fellow Republicans in charge at the Statehouse are practically bending over backward to make it easier to vote. By requiring all those who register to vote in the state to acquire an Ohio driver’s license and vehicle registration within 30 days, voters would have an additional form of acceptable identification to present at the polls.

The last round of voter restrictions came after the 2010 Republican wave, when new GOP majorities passed voter identification laws and slashed ballot access in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. Now, three months after the 2014 Republican wave, another class of state lawmakers are prepping another assault on voting rights under the same guise of “uniformity” and “ballot integrity.”

Supporters for marijuana legalization say that the city of Hamilton’s proposal to ban medical marijuana sales throughout its limits ahead of any potential statewide vote is premature, and city residents began to voice their dissent against the change in zoning ordinances late last week.

More than 15,000 Ohioans tried to cast a ballot but didn’t have their votes counted in the November 2014 general election. And that’s good news, says a report unveiled yesterday by the Ohio secretary of state’s office, because it’s fewer than those who had their ballots thrown out in the previous gubernatorial election four years earlier.

The Republican electoral sweep in yesterday’s elections has put an end to speculation over whether new laws making it harder to vote in 21 states would help determine control of the Senate this year. But while we can breathe a sigh of relief that the electoral outcomes won’t be mired in litigation, a quick look at the numbers shows that in several key races, the margin of victory came very close to the likely margin of disenfranchisement.

The new president of the NAACP told a group of about 300 people at Tangier on Sunday that the No. 1 item on his agenda is to fully restore the Voting Rights Act.