OHIO CAPITAL JOURNAL: Ohio voting rights groups urge Gov. DeWine to veto bill nixing absentee ballot grace period
By Nick Evans
Ohio voting rights advocates are urging Gov. Mike DeWine to veto a voting measure approved just before lawmakers left for the holidays. The bill, Ohio Senate Bill 293, eliminates a grace period for absentee ballots post-marked by Election Day to arrive by mail, which GOP lawmakers have been whittling away in recent years.
Lawmakers also lumped in several provisions targeting noncitizens on the voting rolls. It’s an issue Secretary of State Frank LaRose has repeatedly raised even as he insists on Ohio’s “gold standard” electoral system.
LaRose has flagged hundreds of registrations since taking office. State and county prosecutors have largely dismissed his allegations as meritless. Earlier this month, LaRose tried again and sent those cases to U.S. Department of Justice.
The last-minute changes to S.B. 293 will give much greater weight to LaRose’s regular reviews of the voter rolls.
Not only does it require audits occur monthly (despite federal law barring removals during a 90-day ‘quiet period’ before federal elections), but it also directs county boards to cancel a person’s registration without notice if the secretary determines the person isn’t a citizen.
Just last year, LaRose’s reviews erroneously targeted several recently naturalized citizens.
Testifying before an Ohio House committee the day prior to the bill’s passage, LaRose downplayed the changes.
The more than 7,000 ballots that arrived after Election Day in 2024?
“That is .0129% of the overall,” LaRose said, noting that already two-thirds of states have the same deadline in place.
The move to cancel registrations? LaRose sidestepped that, insisting the change “simply” defines federal data as “one of the approved sets of data for conducting voter list maintenance.”
Read the full article in the Ohio Capital Journal.
November 27, 2025.
