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. […]
The audits
The organization VoteRiders helps voters get the ID they need to cast a ballot in their state.
The group’s legal director, Ceridwen Cherry, said routinely scouring federal database and Ohio’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles records to “root out suspected noncitizen voters is a solution in search of a problem.”
Information in the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database isn’t always up to date, she explained.
There’s also no state or federal law requiring naturalized citizens to update their driver’s license.
That means a new citizen could register to vote, and one or both of the databases LaRose uses to review their registration might wrongly indicate that they’re ineligible.
And Cherry worries the bill “does not give incorrectly flagged eligible US citizens a chance to prove their citizenship. Instead, they would be purged from voter rolls without warning or recourse.”
VoteRiders worked with the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement to study Americans’ access to documentary proof of citizenship.
They found more than 21 million Americans, or more than 9% of the voting age population, do not have ready access to the documents they need.
Cherry warns those two factors together — lack of warning and lack of access — could lead to otherwise eligible voters being disenfranchised because they don’t have what they need and don’t have time to get it. […]
Read the full article in the Ohio Capital Journal.
November 27, 2025.
