The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Ohio lawmakers are pushing for changes that would make voter list maintenance more frequent and far more demanding. A measure sponsored by Reps. Scott Wiggam, R-Wayne County, and Beth Lear, R-Galena, got an overhaul last week adding in documentary proof of citizenship requirements and moving list maintenance to a monthly rather than yearly process — their initial bill would’ve required checking the list weekly.
Voters whose registrations have discrepancies like mismatched addresses, incorrect driver’s license numbers or a missing date of birth, would have to vote with a provisional ballot. For their vote to count they’d have return to the county board with the relevant proof of identity, or residence or citizenship.
In the name of transparency, the legislation requires the secretary of state to post reports after those reviews, listing the flagged registrants. Information like driver’s license and Social Security numbers or email addresses and phone numbers would get redacted, but the voter’s name, address, and citizenship status would be included.
In committee, a supporter named Marcell Strbich claimed “Ohio is not yet but will be in compliance with federal law” if lawmakers approve the legislation.
The federal Voting Rights Act explicitly mandates “a program to systematically remove ineligible voters must not be done within 90 days of a federal election,” according to DOJ guidance. Wiggam and Lear’s measure cuts those restrictions out of state law.
The stakes
Requiring proof of citizenship would make Ohio’s voter registration system among the strictest in the country. According to the Voting Rights Lab, only three other states —Arizona, New Hampshire and Louisiana — have enacted similar requirements, and for two of them those changes have yet to take effect.
While it seems intuitive to require proof of citizenship if only citizens can vote, it’s far more complex than it seems. Federal law doesn’t impose those requirements, so states can only restrict access to state and local races and their own registration forms. In practice that means two classes of voters—one with access to the full ballot and a different group of “federal only” voters who registered on with a federal form.
Also, it’s not always easy to lay hands on the documents you might need. Remembering which drawer you tucked your birth certificate into is one thing, but what if you got married and changed your name? Do you have a marriage certificate handy, too? One study from the University of Maryland suggested as many as 21 million Americans don’t have ready access to their documents.
The average Ohioan’s personal filing system isn’t the only potential weak link. In Arizona for instance, the state supreme court recently determined 98,000 voters had to have access to the full ballot after election officials realized an error in their own filing system.
To be clear, state officials already comb through the voter rolls regularly. Secretary of State Frank LaRose has been particularly aggressive and outspoken about those efforts, but even so, since taking office in 2019, he’s identifiedfewer than 700 cases of potential fraud.
County prosecutors have largely passed on those cases determining there wasn’t enough evidence to bring charges. Frustrated, LaRose referred the cases to Attorney General Dave Yost, who indicted just six people — one of whom was dead.
Notably, Yost took time out to explain just 138 of the registrants sent to his office had ever even cast a ballot, and he questioned the wisdom of peeling off investigators to track down individuals who likely registered in error with no intention of voting.
Supporters’ testimony
That episode offers an illuminating peek at the way HB 552’s supporters think about the voter rolls.
Rep. Richard Brown pressed Strbich on the scope of the issue. “You know, they’ve looked long and hard for evidence of voter fraud,” he said, “of noncitizens voting, of dead people voting, et cetera, and after that long and tedious search they finally in October of 24 indicted six people in the entire state of Ohio for illegal voting — six.” Brown stressed even those indictments aren’t yet convictions, and he pressed Strbich to explain why the proposed changes are necessary.
But in his response, Strbich’s suspicion wasn’t quelled by the attorney general’s review. He ignored the actual indictments and instead cited the full number of individuals who might have been charged, even though nearly all of them weren’t.
“The reason we have 137 (sic) only, sir, that we found on that noncitizen annual audit was because the screening criteria of our annual noncitizen audit practically requires that a noncitizen admit that they are a noncitizen,” Strbich said.
Those screening criteria zero in on people who have twice indicated they aren’t citizens to the BMV, and importantly, have taken some voting action in between those two BMV interactions. Strbich’s complaints notwithstanding, the secretary of state has already begun running audits that sidestep that formula — generating at least a few of the false positives it was drafted to avoid.
Strbich argued the intent of the bill is to move that kind of review to the front end of the process by ensuring county boards have flagged any voter who’s ineligible to vote prior to the election. “They’re not disenfranchised,” Strbich insisted, but they would have to vote a provisional ballot until they provide the citizenship or identification documents necessary to prove their eligibility.
“An election administration process that does not validate information before creating a voter record and is not transparent to the public is unlikely to achieve accountability weakening that public confidence,” he argued.
Will it boost confidence?
Supporters insist the push for a more stringent voter registration system is about election security rather than achieving partisan ends. Still, the demands for heightened scrutiny in Ohio and elsewhere around the country have come almost exclusively from Republicans.
Donald Trump’s victory might throw a wrench in that playbook.
Restrictions like the ones laid out in HB 552 will likely have greatest impact on low-propensity voters. For years, received wisdom has held that those only occasional voters tend to support Democrats, and so greater restrictions and lower turnout would redound to the benefit of Republicans. But Trump’s apparent success in one of the highest turnout elections in recent memory upends that narrative.
It hasn’t changed how Strbich and other supporters view the voter rolls.
“I think we owe it to Ohioans,” Strbich said, “to give them the peace of mind that noncitizens are not, or find out finally, that noncitizens are not en masse, on our voter rolls,”
“I think we have to do that to keep people believing this is an honest system,” he added.
But supporters set an exceptionally high bar for trusting the state’s voting system. Gail Niederlehner took time out to criticize a different measure in the state Senate which would also require proof of citizenship. To her mind, that measure doesn’t go nearly far enough.
“It creates a significant loophole,” she argued, “by only verifying those who have a driver’s license or state ID. Others can simply provide a copy of proof of citizenship with this which is not authenticated.”
In her own testimony, Niederlehner describes a process where voters who hadn’t proven their citizenship would vote provisionally until their documents had been verified by the board. But she also expressed doubts about using those same documents to verify citizenship. In the 2024 election, a judge green lit a secretary of state policy change effectively requiring recently naturalized citizens still holding a “noncitizen” license bring their naturalization certificate to get a regular ballot.
But to Niederlehner that’s not good enough.
“So, this document I have in front of me that I say is a proof of citizenship has never been authenticated by anyone in the boards of elections,” she complained, “and so automatically, they now become a verified citizen.”
That skepticism extends to full universe of Ohio residents holding noncitizen license. There are 236,000 people in Ohio with that marking on their license, she said, warning darkly that because of the federal Motor Voter law, each one had been asked if they want to register to vote.
“So out of those 236,000 non-residents (sic) who have driver’s license numbers,” she said, “we have no idea, there’s no method for us to be able to track, how many of them are on the voting rolls in the present time.”
Those kinds of improper registrations make up the bulk of cases flagged by the secretary of state — the same ones that netted just six indictments earlier this year. Like the attorney general, county prosecutors downplay those incidents, arguing they’re usually examples of confusion rather than malfeasance. They note in many circumstances the registrant even checks a box describing themselves as a noncitizen but get registered anyway.
But if the bill were to pass, Niederlehner and others would be able to track those cases — likely getting the names and addresses of individuals with discrepancies as significant as lack of citizenship or as minor as an incorrect address, every month in a public report.
