Ohio has taken hundreds of people who are not citizens off of its list of registered voters while the state does a check of all registered voters before the presidential election in November.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose said Thursday that 499 noncitizen registrations will be taken off the state’s voting rolls by county boards of elections.
“I took an oath to protect our state’s constitution, and that document makes it clear that only citizens of the United States can vote in Ohio elections,” LaRose said in a news release. I have to make sure that people who aren’t yet citizens of this country don’t vote because of that. If or when they become citizens, I’ll be the first to praise them and welcome them to voting rights, but until then, the law says we have to get rid of registrations for people who aren’t eligible so they can’t vote illegally.
Now that Ohio is getting ready for the Nov. 5 general election, the state’s voter registration information is being audited in several stages.
This week, LaRose gave the order. In May, the Public Integrity Division and Office of Data Analytics and Archives of the Ohio Secretary of State started checking voting records to see if they were in line with the state’s constitutional requirement for citizenship. At that time, LaRose found 137 illegal immigrants on the voting rolls and took them off.
LaRose also said that Ohio has taken down nearly 155,000 entries that were proven to have been abandoned and inactive for at least four years in a row.
Concerns about the fairness of U.S. elections have been raised by the GOP this election season about the possibility of people who are not citizens voting.
Many Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), support making it illegal for people who are not citizens to vote at the federal level. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is one of them.
Democrats, like Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), say that this kind of legislation could make it impossible for American citizens to vote, like military members stationed abroad and married women whose names have changed.
