The state is still counting up how many of 235,000 voter registrations identified as inactive were removed by county boards of elections starting September 6. But Secretary of State Frank LaRose said he wants to continue to work with voter rights groups who had concerns that active voters might also be removed.
The goal is to purge dead voters, those who’ve moved and duplicate registrations. Secretary of State Frank LaRose said counties were required to send reports on the numbers of registrations they eliminated by last Friday. And his office is still adding up those totals.
LaRose said 14,000 of those initial 235,000 registration are now active because voters updated their addresses or responded to voting rights groups, who asked LaRose for that list to reach out to them. That's up from an initial report that 12,500 registrations had been activated.
And LaRose said once a final list of those registrations that were deleted is assembled, he'll turn it over to the voting rights groups, so they can send out voter registration forms. LaRose did that after a purge of 270,000 in February, at a cost of $130,000 – and 540 forms were returned.
“I think what that shows is that really, by the time you’ve gone through all of these different processes that what remains on that list is mostly bad data, outdated information," LaRose said.
LaRose said deleted voters can re-register by this year’s deadlineon October 7.
LaRose said he's concerned about errors by vendors running voting information databases in Ohio’s 88 counties. He's supporting a bill that would expand the authority of the Ohio Board of Voting Machine Examiners to certify voting registrations system vendors.
(NOTE: This story has been updated to reflect that the voter registration forms will come from the voting rights groups, not from the Secretary of State's office.)
