The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
In May, Nicholas Ross walked into the federal courthouse in downtown Columbus, and alongside about 30 other people, raised his right hand and swore to “bear true faith and allegiance” to the U.S. Constitution. A few weeks later he got a letter in the mail. Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s office was questioning his voter registration.
Ross was born in England to Irish parents, but he has been living in the United States for almost 30 years. He’s married, has kids and a home in Westerville; he’s a professor and chairs the Department of Music at Otterbein University. A shiny black piano dominates his living room, and there’s a surf green Fender Stratocaster on a stand with amps tucked into the corners of the room. His son is the guitar player, Ross said, and when it comes to piano, he plays one-handed now because of a nerve injury.
“And so I play left hand music only,” he explained. “But I’ve got favorites, I like to play Godowsky — Leopold Godowsky.”
Naturalization ceremonies like the one Ross participated in happen regularly all over the country. In Ohio, federal courts generally hold at least one ceremony a month. In Cleveland the court regularly holds two. In addition, the courts routinely hold larger off-site citizenship ceremonies.
According to the most recent published data from the Department of Homeland Security, in Ohio alone, nearly 16,000 people were naturalized during the 2022 fiscal year.
A standard feature of these events is getting newly naturalized citizens registered to vote. As soon as they complete the oath, they’re eligible, and usually there are volunteers on hand with registration forms ready.
LaRose would know — he attended a ceremony in Cleveland back in 2020.
“To see them fill out one of these forms that we were passing out — the voter registration form — something really powerful,” he described. “To become a registered voter is something truly life changing for these individuals and for their families.”
But for every one of those newly eligible voters there’s a potential complication waiting to trip them up — just like it tripped up Ross.
Different databases
The state agency where most residents share information about their citizenship status is the BMV. When you go to get a license, for instance, you must demonstrate your legal presence in the state. If you’re already a citizen, that’s probably your birth certificate. But if you’re not, that might be a green card.
The problem is when a resident gets naturalized, they’re dealing with federal agencies — not state ones. So, if that new citizen previously got a driver’s license, to the BMV they look like a noncitizen until they show up in person with their naturalization certificate.
“I was sent a letter that said, you have been flagged as suspicious,” Ross said about the letter he got from LaRose. It went on to threaten jail time if Ross had registered illegally and asked him to provide information about his citizenship if their audit was incorrect. He quickly filled out the form and sent it back, but the letter struck a sour tone.
“I think the letter should say we just wanted to verify,” Ross described. “Could you, would you, please provide this information for extra verification purposes? None of the ‘you will go to prison,’ ‘This is illegal.’”
“It’s an assumption that people are trying to cheat the system in the letter,” he said. “It should be a different letter.”
The secretary’s follow up only reiterated that impression, Ross said. In addition to acknowledging his response, it states “please know that the information you provided may be used to access federal immigration records for verification purposes.” He and his wife were both kind of shocked, and took it as another veiled threat.
“We will check — well yeah, that’s why I gave you the number,” Ross said. “I mean, again, you don’t need to say it. This letter would be absolutely fine if it didn’t have that, don’t you agree? I mean, it just seems unnecessary.”
Ross was also struck by the rapidity of the registration challenge. After becoming naturalized, he applied for and received a U.S. passport. That’s all he would need to vote and his driver’s license was valid for another few years. Considering he hadn’t moved, and wasn’t explicitly required to update his license, getting to the BMV wasn’t at the top of his list.
“Don’t get me wrong, I just did it, right?” he said, “and it’s only two months since I became a naturalized citizen.”
To Ross, the whole experience seemed overwrought, because so far as he can tell, he did nothing to deserve additional scrutiny.
“That’s all,” he said, “I’m just saying it could be done differently. Because the way it was written makes you feel like, Oh, I’m being accused of doing something wrong.”
Expanding scope
Monday morning, Cassandra Wade was at a Chillicothe campaign event for Republican U.S. Senate nominee Bernie Moreno looking for help. She was clutching an envelope from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services with her Naturalization certificate as well as the letter she got from Secretary LaRose challenging her registration.
Wade described getting the letter Saturday, and later visiting the board of elections to figure out what happened.
“I go over there, and they said I’m not on the voter’s registration because I’ve been purged,” Wade said.
“I’m a naturalized citizen. I did everything right,” she continued. “I waited my 10 years, I paid my way, did the medical, I worked, I paid my taxes.”
“And this is how now constitutional rights have been —” she added, miming an explosion with her hands.
Moreno campaign staffers were quick to take down her information and call the secretary’s office. When Wade got a call a later that day, she said LaRose’s staffers were even more perplexed than she was.
In the end, however, it appears LaRose’s audit prompted confusion rather than an actual removal. Cleveland.com’s Andrew Tobias reported LaRose’s team initially identified Wade through BMV records, but later verified her citizenship. A review of the Ross County Board of Elections website shows Wade is still registered to vote.
Unlike Ross, Wade’s naturalization went through years ago. She first applied in 2020, but because of COVID didn’t get to take the oath until October of 2022. She missed the registration deadline for that November’s election by just two days, but she’s made a point of voting in each election since. Puzzlingly, Wade claims she has visited the BMV since then, too.
Although Wade is relieved to learn her registration is still valid, she expressed concerns about how many others might wind up in similar circumstances. With three kids, Wade said, she really doesn’t have time to prove her citizenship again when she’s done nothing wrong.
“He’s picking on the wrong people,” she said of LaRose’s audit.
Naturalization
Last Thursday, LaRose announced he’d sent notice to county boards of election directing them to remove 499 allegedly noncitizen registrations from their voter rolls. He said he’s “duty-bound” to ensure people who have yet to become citizens are not voting.
“If or when they do become citizens,” LaRose said, “I’ll be the first one to congratulate them and welcome them to the franchise. But until then the law requires us to remove ineligible registrations to prevent illegal voting.”
The Secretary’s press release describes checking cases against a federal database known as SAVE that should have record of naturalized citizens. It’s unclear, however, if LaRose’s office checked all the individuals against federal records. The release separately describes a group of 136 registrations they identified using BMV records.
LaRose did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Ohio Capital Journal requested the list of individuals removed as part of the audit, but LaRose’s office has yet to release any information.
Also on Thursday, 50 people filed into federal Judge Mina Nami Khorrami’s courtroom in Columbus. One by one they stood and introduced themselves to the judge and told her where they came from. The hopefuls hailed from countries all over the globe — Colombia, Jamaica, Ghana, India, Cambodia, and many others — but each one of them clutched the same small American flag.
From its founding, Nami Khorrami told them, U.S. citizenship hasn’t been limited to those who were fortunate enough to be born here. She urged them to take their right to vote seriously and do everything they can to inform themselves before casting a ballot. An immigrant herself, Nami Khorrami described how she came to the U.S. from Iran in 1977, and became a citizen in 1984. But she insisted her story is not unique — the United States is unique.
After taking the oath, the new citizens lined up for photos with the judge.
Speaking after the ceremony, Nami Khorrami expressed concern about naturalized citizens having their voter registration challenged. As soon as they take the oath, she said, they’re eligible to register. If there’s a problem harmonizing state data with federal data, she said, the state should do something about it. Perhaps the BMV could have someone come to the ceremony she suggested. Maybe the court itself would have to start warning new citizens to update their BMV records quickly to avoid the problem.
In a follow up email, she explained the court is looking into what it can do, but they haven’t taken any definitive steps yet.
What’s the best path forward?
In his press release, LaRose portrayed the effort as a balancing act. While he wanted to give flagged individuals “the benefit of the doubt,” he said he is compelled to protect state voter rolls.
“We want to make sure a mistaken registration doesn’t become an illegal vote,” LaRose explained. “We also want to make sure that lawfully registered citizens can participate seamlessly in the process, especially if their citizenship status changed recently.”
For Ross of course, the process wasn’t seamless — it felt presumptive and unnecessarily accusatory. And voting rights advocates worry other Ohioans who registered legally could get caught up in the process.
“It is important to have accurate voter rolls,” Jen Miller from the League of Women Voters of Ohio said. “My concern is that this process might actually be removing eligible voters from the rolls simply because those voters were intimidated or confused by the letter they got from the secretary of state, while also the secretary (is) using outdated information.”
Ohio regularly removes large groups of registrations from its rolls due to lack of voter activity. This supplementary process is often derided by critics as a “voter purge.” But unlike that process, LaRose has not publicly shared the names of the almost 500 voters he has ordered county boards to remove. That gives the public little opportunity to check the secretary’s work, unless individual voters come forward.
LaRose’s use of the SAVE database is an arguably an improvement on past practice. In an earlier story, Ohio Capital Journal referenced the system as potential tool to improve the office’s track record with claims of noncitizen voter fraud.
But Miller worries even that database has its shortcomings.
For one, it has no record whatsoever of people who are born in the United States. That means if a native-born citizen was included on accident, they might look like a noncitizen.
The database also requires users to have an immigration identifier to check. That is to say, you can’t just type in a name and date of birth to see if that person recently naturalized; you’ll need their naturalization number as well for the system to run its checks. If the secretary’s letter asking for immigration information doesn’t get an answer — whether because they really were registered incorrectly or didn’t realize a response was necessary or it simply went to an old address — they could see their registration removed.
LaRose noted at least 80 people didn’t respond to his correspondence.
It’s also unclear how quickly changes in an individual’s immigration status are reflected in the database. Ohio Capital Journal’s request for comment with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees the SAVE database, went unanswered.
From the outside looking in, Miller explained, it’s difficult to see how agencies share information.
“But it is clear that there is an agency, conducting naturalizations nearly every day in Ohio, that has the best data for the secretary to use when verifying citizenship for voter registration purposes,” she said.
Miller allowed that BMV or Secretary of State officials could show up at naturalization ceremonies, but she argued even that is overcomplicating matters.
“Why couldn’t it just be that every time there is one in Ohio that information gets directly sent to the BMV and to the secretary of state?” she asked.
“You know what I mean?” Miller added, “To me, in my mind it should not even be as labor intensive as having to send a staff person to one of these.”
Notably, the secretary has called for access to court records as part of his advocacy for a measure called the SAVE Act. The U.S. House bill requires federal entities to hand over effectively anything states request to verify citizenship. But the measure’s far more consequential change would require every voter to demonstrate proof of citizenship to register to vote. Similar legislation in Kansas was overturned by courts after it disenfranchised thousands of eligible voters.
However he does it, Ross wants the secretary to double check before sending letters, not send letters to double check.
“Knowing that this can happen for recently naturalized citizens like myself, that that can be double checked even before sending that letter,” he said. “I just don’t feel like the letter should assume that I’m incorrectly registered — that I sent in the form incorrectly. I’d rather it be the other way around, you know?
