By Marty Schladen
With Republicans pushing a law requiring proof of citizenship to vote, new research shows that huge numbers in Ohio and elsewhere lack ready access to such documents.
The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
As with his GOP colleagues in other states, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has failed to show that noncitizen voting is a significant problem in the Buckeye State. Even so, he last year started requiring naturalized citizens to show proof of citizenship when challenged at the polls.
Now, national Republicans are poised to go much further.
Next week, the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the Save American Voter Eligibility (or SAVE) Act. Among its provisions is a requirement that people produce proof of citizenship when they register to vote.
As in Ohio, national Republicans haven’t produced any evidence that noncitizen voting is a substantial problem.
There are severe penalties for noncitizen voting, and they seem to be an effective deterrent. A Brennan Center for Justice study of the 2016 election found noncitizen voting occurred at the vanishingly small rate of 0.0001%.
That’s one-fifth the rate of fraud of all types that LaRose found in the 2020 election — 0.0005%. But those infinitesimal numbers haven’t stopped him from conducting massive voter purges, limiting drop boxes, and otherwise making it harder to vote.
If Republicans are successful in creating a national requirement to prove citizenship, much larger numbers of legitimate voters could be affected. The University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement this week produced an analysis using surveys conducted last year and in 2023. The analysis was conducted in partnership with the voting-rights group VoteRiders.
Read the full article at news5cleveland.com.
March 29, 2025.
