COLUMBUS, Ohio — With Election Day just around the corner, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has purged nearly 27,000 people from the voting rolls. The purge includes 85 of the 88 counties across Ohio, with Summit and Cuyahoga being two of the exceptions, along with Lucas County.
Summit, Cuyahoga, and Lucas counties won't purge their voter rolls until after the Nov. 7 election because they each had primaries in the last month, which didn't give the office enough time to go through the rolls.
According to LaRose's office, 26,666 Ohio voters were purged in the most recent process. Click here to see if your voter registration is still active.
So why might a person be purged from the voter rolls? We spoke to voting rights and redistricting expert Atiba Ellis, who is a professor at Case Western Reserve University.
"These (purges) are done to remove from the rolls the names of voters who are likely in active and likely not in the jurisdiction to vote," Ellis explained. "That can include people who have passed away, people who are no longer in the jurisdiction, people who are no longer eligible to vote."
3News reached out to the Secretary of State's office and received the following statement:
"When it comes to maintain our voter rolls, we don’t quietly “purge” active voters. We remove inactive registrations after we’ve learned a voter has moved and not been active at the address for more than four years. That’s been the federal law or three decades, and its essential to keeping out rolls honest by eliminating duplicate registrations."
The state is legally required to notify the people being purged ahead of time, but that can be as simple as a postcard, which Ellis says can easily be missed.
"Given the state of the current election, there's a risk that some part of the sizable number of people who got purged will have their voice silenced with regards to the issues on the November ballot without them ever intending to do so," Ellis told 3News.
In Ohio, if you're purged from the voter rolls, you must re-register before 30 days prior to the election. So if that deadline is missed, someone who could have voted before the purge is now ineligible until they re-register and then must wait until the next election.
Ellis pointed out that civil rights advocates argue that overly aggressive purges "often replicate the discriminatory practices of the past, because they don't take into account the circumstances that might be on poor people and poor people of color that it takes to register in the first place."
More 3News election coverage:
- What does Ohio Issue 1 mean in the November general election? Here's what it would change
- Ohio Issue 2: Here's what you need to know about recreational marijuana legalization initiative
- List of Northeast Ohio school districts with levies and bond issues on the November 7 election ballot
- 3News Investigates: Who's funding campaigns for and against Ohio Issue 1?