Voting rights groups sue Ohio over law canceling registrations without notice

A pair of voting rights groups are suing Ohio’s secretary of state over a controversial piece of voting legislation signed into law late last year.

The League of Women Voters and Council on American-Islamic Relations are asking the court to block portions of the law from taking effect. The ACLU and Campaign Legal Center are representing them in court.

Ohio Senate Bill 293’s most notable change was the elimination of a four-day grace period for absentee ballots. But the measure also directs the secretary of state to comb through the voter registration database monthly to remove suspected noncitizens on the rolls.

What could be wrong with that? The voting rights groups contend Ohio’s law relies on shaky data to remove voters when federal law doesn’t allow it — and without providing notice to the voters facing removal.

“Senate Bill 293’s requirement that there be systematic voter purges is discriminatory and unlawful and it threatens to disenfranchise perfectly eligible voters,” ACLU of Ohio Chief Legal Officer Freda Levenson said in a press release.

“Using manifestly unreliable data to cull our voter rolls doesn’t protect the integrity of our elections — it harms it.”

Ohio Capital Journal reached out to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose for comment about the case. His office did not respond.

(Not so) quiet period

The biggest, and most obvious fault in Ohio’s law is its apparent violation of the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day quiet period.

The 30-plus year-old statute that required voter registration at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles also placed limits on the systematic removal of people on the rolls.

State officials can do as much list maintenance as they want so long as they don’t do it during the 90 days before a federal election.

The idea is simple and well-established: cancelling a person’s registration right before an election gives them little chance to correct the issue if they were removed in error.

“Because the secretary ‘shall’ institute citizenship database reviews every month,” the complaint states, “he will necessarily institute at least two (and possibly more) systematic removal programs during the NVRA’s prescribed ‘quiet period.’”

Stale data

The voting rights groups also worry about the data state officials will use for the audits.

The law directs the secretary to review data from the BMV and a federal program known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements or SAVE. The problem is that information in both systems gets stale.

Once a green card holder goes through the naturalization process, they’re a citizen, and thus eligible to vote. But if they don’t update their driver’s license — which are valid for four to eight years, and new citizens aren’t required to update — according to the state of Ohio they still look like a noncitizen.

And naturalizations aren’t just a handful of people here or there.

In fiscal year 2023, the most recent data on record, more than 16,000 people naturalized in Ohio.

Over the previous decade, roughly 12,000 people on average naturalized in the state each year.

The SAVE system allows state agencies to check several federal databases at once. But it doesn’t present a comprehensive list of U.S. citizens and some of its underlying datasets have proven to be outdated or unreliable.

The complaint points to examples of naturalized citizens getting erroneously flagged in Ohio as well as North Carolina and Texas; it notes as well that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledged last October that its SAVE system “may share inaccurate information.”

CAIR and the League of Women Voters argue that relying on those tools puts naturalized citizens at greater risk of disenfranchisement.

“Naturalized citizens have fulfilled every legal requirement and sworn an oath to this country,” CAIR Northern Ohio Executive Director Faten Husni Odeh said in a press release. “Singling them out with new barriers is discriminatory and unacceptable.”

Jen Miller who heads up Ohio’s League of Women voters added, “Instead of welcoming new voters who have gone to great lengths to participate in our democracy, S.B. 293 creates an unnecessary, discriminatory hurdle for naturalized citizens to cast their ballots.”

No notice

Lastly, the voting rights groups object to state officials apparently removing voter registrations they suspect are illegitimate before giving the voter a chance to respond.

When it comes to Ohio’s annual list maintenance process that removes inactive registrations, officials send out a notice alerting the voter that their registration is at risk of cancellation.

But under S.B. 293, once the Secretary flags alleged noncitizens, the county boards “promptly shall cancel” the flagged registrations.

The secretary’s latest Ohio Election Manual gives counties five business days to complete the task and directs them to send out a notice form after the fact.

Voters can request a hearing to challenge that cancellation within 30 days. But the notice itself makes no mention of the deadline and frames the cancellation as a fait accompli.

“Both the notice and any opportunity to respond occur only after the individual has been deprived of their interest in being registered to vote,” the complaint states.

What’s more, the law doesn’t appear to give voters a pass when it comes to Ohio’s voter registration deadline, 30 days prior to an election.

“It appears that if a previously registered voter whose registration has been cancelled misses the 30-day deadline to request a hearing with the county board of elections — or if their registration is canceled within the 30-day window, which S.B. 293 not only enables, but requires — then the individual may be deprived of the right to vote in Ohio,” the complaint says.

The voting rights groups acknowledge the Election Manual alludes to the secretary providing prior notice to flagged registrants.

But the complaint notes “there are no details as to when the notice will be provided, what form it will take, and how long the voter has to respond before their name is sent to the boards for cancellation.”

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