Voter fraud is extremely rare. But Ohio’s Republican secretary of state said he’s found more than a thousand noncitizens who appear to have illegally registered to vote, including some who actually voted in recent federal elections. He took those cases to county prosecutors, and now is forwarding them to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Secretary of State Frank LaRose said he’s found 1,084 alleged cases of noncitizens who registered to vote, including 167 people who allegedly voted in a federal election going back to 2018.
“In these cases, the county prosecutor has decided for whatever reason not to take them up. In some cases they've been referred to the attorney general as well, and we're sending them along to the federal government to see if they want to prosecute these cases," LaRose said in an interview.
LaRose credited an investigative unit in his office with finding these cases. He said it doesn't appear there's a pattern to the cases, but he said it's unusual.
"What we know is that noncitizens registering is exceedingly rare. It's even more rare for noncitizens to actually cast a ballot, especially now that we've got a really good process in place for identifying that at the time of registration and checking for that," LaRose said. "But in some cases it has happened. And we're talking about hundreds of cases, not thousands and thousands of cases."
A release from LaRose's office also said 135 other cases were referred, including:
- 99 people who appeared to have voted in Ohio and another state in the same federal election;
- 16 people who appeared to have voted twice in Ohio in the same federal election;
- 14 people who appear to have voted in a federal election after their deaths;
- 4 people who are suspected of ballot harvesting; and
- 2 people who were registered at an address where they weren't entitled to be registered.
LaRose had asked county prosecutors to act on 633 cases of suspected voter fraud last year. Prosecutors took up just 12 of them, saying the others lacked evidence to pursue indictments. LaRose took the cases to Attorney General Dave Yost, who presented them to grand juries. Six cases resulted in indictments, including a person who died in December 2022.
