Ohio Secretary Of State Finds 499 More Noncitizens Registered To Vote

By: M.D. Kittle, originally published August 2, 2024, The Federalist

With three months to go before November’s presidential election, the need to clean up the voter rolls is becoming more urgent every day.

Another day, another bundle of noncitizen voter registrations discovered on state voting rolls. But there’s still nothing to see here — so say the left and their election integrity-denying accomplices in corporate media. 

On Thursday, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced he was directing local elections officials to remove nearly 500 foreign national registrations from Ohio’s voter rolls. The suspected illegal registrations were detected as part of a statewide audit of Ohio’s voter registration database.

With a little more than three months to go before November’s presidential election and a little more than two months before early in-person and absentee voting begins in the Buckeye State, the need to clean up the rolls is becoming more urgent every day. With a projected 10 million illegal immigrant encounters at the U.S. border on President Joe Biden’s watch, the very real possibility that some noncitizens could vote in November’s election could tip the balance in the outcome — particularly in critical battleground states. 

‘Shockingly Easy for Noncitizens to Vote’

Democrats dismiss the idea that illegal aliens and other foreign nationals will break the law and risk felony charges by violating the honor system that’s supposed to bar noncitizens from voting in federal elections. At the least, they delude themselves and others. 

“Those making this argument ignore a glaring problem: the government officials who register voters and conduct federal elections aren’t allowed to require proof of citizenship,” wrote U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, in a recent column for The Federalist. “It’s therefore shockingly easy for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, leaving our elections dangerously vulnerable to foreign interference. Anyone — even an illegal alien or other noncitizen — can register to vote in federal elections, just by checking a box and signing a form.”

As the New York Post reported in June, government agencies in the vast majority of U.S. states “are providing voter registration forms to migrants without requiring proof of citizenship.” 

In May, a spokesman for South Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services told The Federalist that the department, as the state’s Medicaid agency, is mandated to provide voter registration information under Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act Of 1993. The information apparently goes out to everyone applying for the benefits, including foreign nationals.

A video shared Thursday by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project shows noncitizens admitting that they are registered to vote.

“There are an estimated 339,000 non-citizens living in Georgia. If the 14% proportion holds true state wide, this would equate to over 47,000 registered non-citizens,” the Oversight Project wrote on X. “For context, Joe Biden ‘won’ the state of Georgia by less than 12,000 votes in 2020.”

That’s why elections officials serious about election integrity are working overtime to remove noncitizen voter registrations from their voter rolls. 

Preventing an ‘Illegal Vote’

LaRose is leading on that front. His office earlier launched what the secretary of state has described as a “multi-phase, comprehensive” audit of the statewide voter registration database. In May the agency’s Public Integrity Division and Office of Data Analytics and Archives began a review of voter records to confirm that registrations complied with Ohio’s constitutional citizenship requirement. In 2022, Buckeye State voters overwhelmingly approved (77% to 23%) a constitutional amendment specifying that only U.S. citizens shall vote in local and state elections.

During a first sweep, using identification records from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles database, agents discovered 136 voter registrations from individuals who twice confirmed that they are not U.S. citizens, according to the secretary. Of the total, 80 failed to respond when sent official notices “to either confirm their citizenship status or cancel their registration.” Those registrations are being scrubbed from the rolls, LaRose said.

On Thursday, Ohio’s top elections official said an additional 499 noncitizen registrations have been detected. Registrants removed include individuals who confirmed that they are not U.S. citizens to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, a status further confirmed by the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database system, the secretary of state’s office reported.

LaRose noted any individual whose registration is removed may submit a provisional ballot. If they can prove citizenship, their ballot will be counted. 

“I want to give these folks the benefit of the doubt and say that most of them didn’t intend to break the law,” LaRose said in the press release. “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.”

Cleaning Up Ohio’s Voter Rolls

In May, the secretary of state ordered county election administrators to begin a “routine but enhanced” search of voter lists. County election boards as of last week, at LaRose’s direction, had removed nearly 155,000 inactive and abandoned registrations — many based on address changes. 

And county election officials are using a new “digital dashboard tool” to track voter registration discrepancies, from illegal characters in name fields to unreasonably high ages. 

“Every state is required to have an ongoing process to verify the accuracy of its voter rolls, but Ohio has the most advanced and effective protocols in the nation,” LaRose said in rolling out the clean voter roll initiative. “This work is not only critical to keeping our elections honest, but it’s also essential to making sure our election officials can properly plan for the right number of ballots, voting machines, polling places and poll workers.”

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist.