By Nick Evans
Ohio Capital Journal
COLUMBUS — Ohio voting rights advocates are urging Gov. Mike DeWine to veto a voting measure approved just before lawmakers left for the holidays. The bill, Ohio Senate Bill 293, eliminates a grace period for absentee ballots post-marked by Election Day to arrive by mail, which GOP lawmakers have been whittling away in recent years.
Lawmakers also lumped in several provisions targeting noncitizens on the voting rolls. It’s an issue Secretary of State Frank LaRose has repeatedly raised even as he insists on Ohio’s “gold standard” electoral system.
LaRose has flagged hundreds of registrations since taking office. State and county prosecutors have largely dismissed his allegations as meritless. Earlier this month, LaRose tried again and sent those cases to U.S. Department of Justice.
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The last-minute changes to S.B. 293 will give much greater weight to LaRose’s regular reviews of the voter rolls.
Not only does it require audits occur monthly (despite federal law barring removals during a 90-day ‘quiet period’ before federal elections), but it also directs county boards to cancel a person’s registration without notice if the secretary determines the person isn’t a citizen.
Just last year, LaRose’s reviews erroneously targeted several recently naturalized citizens.
Testifying before an Ohio House committee the day prior to the bill’s passage, LaRose downplayed the changes.
The more than 7,000 ballots that arrived after Election Day in 2024?
“That is .0129% of the overall,” LaRose said, noting that already two-thirds of states have the same deadline in place.
The move to cancel registrations? LaRose sidestepped that, insisting the change “simply” defines federal data as “one of the approved sets of data for conducting voter list maintenance.”
The deadline
The impetus for changing Ohio’s absentee ballot deadline came, at least in part, from the U.S. Department of Justice.
In March, President Trump asserted in an executive order that all ballots arriving after Election Day should be thrown out.
LaRose told lawmakers DOJ attorneys have warned his office they would sue Ohio if it didn’t change state law to comply.
“I think it’s just very unusual for the Department of Justice to act as the President’s lobbyist,” Center for Election Innovation and Research Executive Director David Becker said of that pressure campaign.
The Department of Justice’s role is to enforce federal law, he said, and there’s no federal law defining the time when ballots need to arrive.
“There is no federal law that does that whatsoever,” he said, “and for the Department of Justice to be pressuring states is, at best, highly unusual, and at worst, outright corrupt.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a case out of Mississippi in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled against a similar grace period.
Several state lawmakers voiced concern about what happens if the court eliminates grace periods nationwide. And worse, the possibility of that decision landing next summer between Ohio’s primary and general elections.
Becker acknowledged that decision could go either way but called the Fifth Circuit’s interpretation “unusual.”
The audits
The organization VoteRiders helps voters get the ID they need to cast a ballot in their state.
The group’s legal director, Ceridwen Cherry, said routinely scouring federal database and Ohio’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles records to “root out suspected noncitizen voters is a solution in search of a problem.”
Information in the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database isn’t always up to date, she explained.
There’s also no state or federal law requiring naturalized citizens to update their driver’s license.
That means a new citizen could register to vote, and one or both of the databases LaRose uses to review their registration might wrongly indicate that they’re ineligible.
And Cherry worries the bill “does not give incorrectly flagged eligible US citizens a chance to prove their citizenship. Instead, they would be purged from voter rolls without warning or recourse.”
VoteRiders worked with the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement to study Americans’ access to documentary proof of citizenship.
They found more than 21 million Americans, or more than 9% of the voting age population, do not have ready access to the documents they need.
Cherry warns those two factors together — lack of warning and lack of access — could lead to otherwise eligible voters being disenfranchised because they don’t have what they need and don’t have time to get it.
DeWine’s call
The governor has ten days to decide on whether to sign the bill once it arrives on his desk.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the Senate has not yet sent it to the governor.
But the Ohio Voter Rights Coalition, which includes groups like the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, and the ACLU of Ohio, is already urging DeWine to reject the bill.
In a press release the group criticized the measure for “needlessly eliminat(ing) the post-election window” and imposing audits “that will drastically increase the number of provisional ballots.”
And the coalition calls back to DeWine’s own 2023 signing statement when he approved Ohio House Bill 458.
That bill required voters show photo ID to cast a ballot and directed the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to put a “noncitizen” designation on driver’s licenses or IDs issued to people who aren’t U.S. citizens.
Notably, just like the bill headed to DeWine’s desk, H.B. 458 shortened the deadline for absentee ballots — cutting it from 10 days post-election to four.
Should DeWine sign the bill, Ohio voters will see a different absentee ballot deadline in three successive federal elections.
On signing the bill, DeWine said, “I believe with the enactment of the new election integrity provisions in House Bill 458, this matter should be settled, and I do not expect to see any further statutory changes to Ohio voting procedures while I am Governor.”
The Ohio Voter Rights Coalition is now calling on DeWine to “veto this anti-democratic bill immediately, stand by his word, and reaffirm his commitment to Ohio voters.”
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