Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose is no doubt raising the bar on election integrity, but the Buckeye State’s “gold standard” election administration status definitely has some blemishes. There’s still a long way to go and not much time to deal with blotches in the voter rolls before ballot-casting season begins.
While LaRose has fired off press releases in recent months highlighting efforts to find and remove noncitizens and other ineligible voters from the rolls, election integrity watchdogs say the bigger battle is on the front and back ends of the elections field. They’re calling for better vetting, giving county boards of elections access to deeper identity-tracking data and, more urgently, wider use of provisional ballots to keep up with an “honor system” that automatically commits deficient registrations to the voter rolls.
Matching Mismatches
Last week, the Republican secretary of state announced his office had tracked 499 additional foreign national registrations. LaRose directed local election officials to remove the suspected illegal registrations — detected as part of a statewide audit of Ohio’s voter registration database.
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.
But here’s the rub: county boards of elections don’t have direct comprehensive access to Bureau of Motor Vehicles, Social Security Administration, and other critical databases used in verifying voter records on the front end. Nor do they
