LaRose launches innovative tool for election officials to audit voter registrations following successful pilot program
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced Friday the statewide expansion of a new voter registration data integrity program aimed at improving the accuracy of Ohio’s statewide voter rolls.
The program initially launched with six county boards of elections, providing them with county-specific digital dashboards to help identify voter registration discrepancies. The dashboards offer immediate access to registration records that have been flagged for additional review and correction, such as illegal characters in name fields, placeholder birth dates, unreasonably high ages and improper birth/registration date combinations.
After successfully testing, the Secretary of State’s office is now deploying the tool to all remaining county boards of elections with the goal of helping them meet their obligations to research and remedy voter registration anomalies.
“These data entry discrepancies are not commonly indicative of fraud or irregularities, but they must be resolved in order to comply with our shared statutory responsibility to maintain the accuracy of the statewide voter registration database,” said Secretary LaRose. “Many of Ohio’s registration records have been manually entered into the system from a hand-written form, which can sometimes lead to data entry errors. This innovative tool will help every county election office to clear up these issues more effectively, and I look forward to building on the success of the pilot program as we get ready for the November election.”
Dante Lewis, Lake County Board of Elections Director, added, “Updating and maintaining over 162,000 voter registration records in Lake County is quite a task, and one in which our registration department has excelled. The Ohio Secretary of State’s Registration Audit Dashboard has helped to provide a cross-check on voter names, birthdays, and registration dates to ensure even greater accuracy in our voter registration system.”
Utilizing the new Registration Audit Dashboard, county boards of elections will now be required to review and resolve the following errors:
1. Prohibited name characters. The Election Official Manual Chapter 4 lists data entry standards for voter names, including a list of characters that are not permitted in name fields such as hyphens, apostrophes and periods. The dashboard flags voter names containing these characters for correction by the boards of elections.
2. Placeholder birth dates. Prior to the creation of a statewide voter registration database, boards had inconsistent methods of recording birth dates. This led to the use of “placeholder” dates, such as Jan. 1, 1800, that need to be corrected to reflect the voter’s actual birth date.
3. Registration before birth. The voter’s Registration Date is earlier than their Birth Date, indicating they registered to vote before they were born. This issue is most caused by human error when entering voter registration information.
4. Registration under 17. The voter’s Registration Date is less than 17 years after their Birth Date, indicating they registered to vote before they were 17 years old. This is also generally the result of a data entry error.
5. Unreasonably high age. The voter’s age is 110 years old or greater according to their Birth Date. The oldest living American is 114, so these registrations will need to be investigated. Generally, this type of error occurs when a board fails to remove a voter registration after a voter has died.
With the passage of the DATA Act in 2023, the Ohio Secretary of State created the Office of Data Analytics and Archives. This team has been tasked with identifying innovative solutions for managing Ohio’s elections data and fostering greater transparency in the elections space. The Registration Audit Dashboard is the latest data integrity effort announced by the office and continues Ohio’s national leadership on election integrity.
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