Ohio is removing nearly 500 improper registrations from its voter rolls in an effort to crack down on non-citizen voting. Praise God!

From Ohio Secretary of State. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced today that county boards of elections are being directed to remove an additional 499 non-citizen registrations from Ohio’s voter rolls. The latest action comes as part of a multi-phase, comprehensive audit of the statewide voter registration database ahead of the November general election.

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“I swore an oath to uphold the constitution of our state, and that document clearly states that only United States citizens can participate in Ohio elections,” said Secretary LaRose. “That means I’m duty-bound to make sure people who haven’t yet earned citizenship in this country aren’t voting. If or when they do become citizens, I’ll be the first one to congratulate them and welcome them to the franchise, but until then the law requires us to remove ineligible registrations to prevent illegal voting.”

In May, the Secretary of State’s Public Integrity Division and Office of Data Analytics and Archives initiated a review of voter records for compliance with Ohio’s constitutional citizenship requirement. Using identification records provided by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV), the office found 136 voter registrations assigned to Ohio residents who twice confirmed their non-citizenship status to the BMV. Eighty of those individuals failed to respond to notices asking that they either confirm their citizenship status or cancel their registration, and boards are initiating the removal of those registrations.

The latest removals announced today include individuals who confirmed their non-citizen status to the BMV, and a subsequent review of the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database system has confirmed them to be non-citizens. These individuals failed to respond to notices from the Secretary of State’s office asking that they either confirm their citizenship status or cancel their registration. Any individual whose registration is removed pursuant to the Secretary’s directive can submit a provisional ballot, which will be counted upon proof of citizenship.

“I want to give these folks the benefit of the doubt and say that most of them didn’t intend to break the law,” said LaRose. “We want to make sure a mistaken registration doesn’t become an illegal vote. We also want to make sure that lawfully registered citizens can participate seamlessly in the process, especially if their citizenship status changed recently.”

Secretary LaRose added that investigations into the citizenship status of voter registration records remain ongoing, and additional removals may be ordered ahead of the November general election. The office’s Election Integrity Unit also will refer cases for criminal prosecution.

Election integrity remains an ongoing priority for the Secretary of State’s office, which continues to be a national leader in ensuring the honesty and accuracy of voter rolls. At the direction of Secretary LaRose, boards completed last week the removal of nearly 155,000 registrations confirmed to be abandoned and inactive for at least four consecutive years. Many of the registrations became eligible for removal due to an address change, where the voter both failed to cancel their old registration as well as respond to a notice asking for confirmation of the registration’s status. The office also recently deployed a new digital dashboard tool to help county election officials better identify voter registration discrepancies, such as illegal characters in name fields, placeholder birth dates, unreasonably high ages, and improper birth/registration date combinations.

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(Press release from Ohio Secretary of State. Photo Credit: Jeff Kubina – Ohio Flag, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35688341)