Secretary LaRose announces enhanced voting data platform
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced this week the launch of a beta project that will provide Ohioans with a new digital dashboard to help analyze voting trends and statistics more effectively during the early voting period.
“Elections are under a microscope like never before, and transparency is essential to the accountability of our elections,” said Secretary LaRose. “We led the passage of landmark legislation that enables us to more effectively retain and report election data, and this resource is the first of several we’ll be launching in the coming months to make good on that commitment.
“We’re working with our county boards of elections to build a data reporting infrastructure that will allow us to provide daily trends related to voting behavior. We’ll ultimately add new dashboards showing voter registration trends and election history.”
LaRose said the first dashboard centers on absentee and early voting statistics, both statewide and by county. Ohioans can use the resource to track types of voting, such as in person, by mail and by drop box.
The full dashboard can be found at https://www.ohiosos.gov/elections/voters/ohio-absentee-data/.
“It’s really important to emphasize that this is still a beta project, and it’s very much a work in progress,” said LaRose. “It’ll take some time to work out the reporting requirements with each county so we can ensure that every input is consistent, but we want to put this out there and let people kick the tires a bit.
“We’ll find anomalies and discrepancies that need to be worked out. That’s part of crowdsourcing. We’re just taking data that’s always been there at the county level and putting it out to the world in a centralized platform. I’m excited about what we’ve done and where this is going."
In July of 2023, Secretary LaRose worked with State Senator Theresa Gavarone to champion the DATA Act, the first effort by any state to require the uniform definition and retention of election records. The legislation requires the Secretary of State to create and maintain a full-time Office of Data Analytics and Archives that will publish election data online, both following an election for auditing purposes and over time for comparative analysis year-over-year.
Since taking office, Secretary LaRose is also the first Secretary of State to publicly disclose voter registration records flagged for removal. He also created the state’s first full-time Election Integrity Unit, implemented the nation’s most extensive audit of statewide voter rolls and adopted Ohio’s first mandatory citizenship check on all voter registrations.
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