Ohio removes 98,000 registrations from rolls
Ohio has completed a purge of 97,795 voter registrations, its first mass cancellation of inactive voters since the 2020 election.
Elections officials have finished the regular cleanup of state voter rolls that began in August, Ohio Secretary of State Frank Larose’s office announced Tuesday.
At that time, 115,816 voter registrations were set to be removed. Since then, thousands of voters either cast ballots in the 2020 election or responded to notices that preserved their registration by a Dec. 7 deadline. Ohio has more than 8 million registered voters.
The list of voter registrations that were canceled is available at www.ohiosos.gov/ registrationreadiness.
Under Ohio law, voters who do not cast ballots for six consecutive years or do not respond to notices asking them to update their registration can be removed from the rolls. Voters also could avoid cancellation by requesting an absentee ballot application or by completing a transaction at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
To vote in the future, purged voters must register anew.
Voter purges in Ohio had been on hold, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the state’s practice of purging inactive voters in 2018. The state began canceling registrations again in 2019.
About 460,000 voter registrations were removed in Ohio in 2019. Hundreds mistakenly placed on the list were saved after The Dispatch and voting rights activists discovered what election officials said was a vendor’s error.
That analysis was possible because Larose was the first secretary of state to publish the list of voter registrations at risk of being canceled. Larose’s office published the list on its website for voters to check whether their registration was set to be removed.
Larose has called for changes to Ohio law that would allow the state to oversee voter registrations rather than leaving them to 88 county boards of elections using different software.
In a press release, Larose’s office said “abandonment” of voter registrations can be attributed to duplicate registrations, voters moving without canceling their previous registration or the death of a voter. rrouan@dispatch.com @Rickrouan