The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Ohio senators are considering a plan to require voters show proof of citizenship to register to vote. In a hearing this week, more than a dozen organizers and activists argued the bill’s stringent requirements would wind up disenfranchising eligible voters.
There is still no evidence of widespread voter fraud, despite Republicans warning for years about the threat posed by alleged noncitizen voters. In Ohio, for instance, the attorney general found six cases of illegal voting spread over twelve years.
Meanwhile, there is solid evidence that many Americans, more than 9% of voting-age citizens according to one study, don’t have up-to-date documents proving citizenship readily available. Name changes from marriage and/or divorce, and the availability of that documentation, complicates things further.
The bill and the pushback
Under Ohio Senate Bill 153, new voters and those updating their registration would have to prove their citizenship before being allowed to vote. In practice, most verifications would happen behind the scenes. Voters would provide their state driver’s license or ID number, and the BMV which typically has record of a person’s citizenship status, will give the board of elections a thumbs up or down.
But if for some reason the BMV can’t verify a voter’s status, they’d need to provide a valid birth certificate, U.S. passport, or naturalization document before casting a ballot. If they don’t, the voter would have to cast a provisional ballot and then provide proof after the fact.
SB 153 takes a skeptical view of those voters. Anyone who casts a provisional ballot and then doesn’t show up with the required documentation would have their registration cancelled.
Over and above the registration changes, the bill would eliminate ballot drop boxes and impose new requirements on petition circulators.
Some of that amounts to red tape — the canvasser would have to personally tally the number of signatures they collected rather than someone else in the campaign, for instance. Another change would require paid circulators to wear a badge identifying themselves as such.
Opponents of the bill emphasized the complications it will create for voters. All Voting is Local Action Senior Campaign Manager Greer Aeschbury argued the changes would lead to a dramatic increase in provisional voting. Her organization tracks provisional ballots, and found some 34,000 of them got rejected in the 2024 election.
“The second most popular reason for rejection was a lack of proper ID,” she explained. “This means that voters attempted to vote, but because of our strict photo ID rules, they either didn’t have the proper ID or simply forgot to bring it in.”
Under SB 153’s changes, Aeschbury said, those voters could show up at the next election, ID in hand because of that prior experience, only to learn their registration got canceled.
Scott Sibley recalled helping his 86-year-old grandfather get a state ID card when he was no longer able to drive. They gathered several documents including birth certificate and Social Security card, but couldn’t meet all five of the elements required by the state BMV.
It took a total of three visits, Sibley said, to get all the necessary documents.
“At the time government photo IDs were not yet a requirement for voting, but after this episode, I understood the arguments against such requirements,” he said. “Is this any way to treat an elderly World War II veteran? I cannot imagine that we would have made it through this new process under SB 153. I think we would have thrown up our hands.”
In addition to making registration more onerous for voters, Kelly Dufour, from Common Cause Ohio, explained the bill also puts new burdens on election officials already reeling from recent changes.
In the last two years, she said, more than “85 sections of related Revised Code have been amended, deleted or removed.” The current proposal would amend 46 more and add three new ones.
“It seems to me it’s a system that’s set up to fail,” she said. “So, I’m just asking to please slow down, maybe let the new laws simmer. Visit with election officials to get some of their input on meaningful improvements.”
She and others commented on election officials’ absence. While lawmakers were holding the hearing elections officials around Ohio were busy certifying the May 6 primary election.
Other voices weigh in
While many organizers criticized the bill’s aggressive approach to verifying registrations, several others argued it doesn’t go far enough.
Half a dozen people showed up to speak as an ‘interested party,’ warning poll workers aren’t adequately trained to verify citizenship documents, or that state officials should be even more proactive in reviewing the voters rolls.
Scott Taylor described himself as a poll worker from Montgomery County, and he zeroed in on the idea of a person providing proof of citizenship on Election Day.
“I got wondering, what would that certificate look like?” he told the committee.
Taylor said he went online, found an example and did a bit of editing. He held up the printout, framed with an ornate, official-looking border a bit like a dollar bill.
“So I generated my own certificate of citizenship, and I produced this in about 15 minutes,” Taylor said. “I went on to Google, and I found an example, and I just cut it up a bit, put a picture of a cat on it.”
He argued that it’s unfair to ask poll workers to distinguish a real document from a fake, so he said that any voter who hasn’t proven their citizenship prior to Election Day should be forced to cast a provisional ballot.
Gail Niederlehner from Butler County insisted that in several ways the bill “closed the front door” only to “leave the back door open.” She said that voters shouldn’t even be allowed to register without providing proof of citizenship.
“Without pre-registration verification, the risk of noncitizen registration continues,” she said.
Niederlehner criticized the bill for accepting expired documents like a passport as proof of citizenship and said the proposal’s regular reviews of the voters aren’t stringent enough.
To this point there has still been just one entity to voice support for the measure.
FGA Action, which previously went by Opportunity Solutions Project, is a Florida-based think tank that advocates for conservative policies in statehouses around the country. It gets some of its funding from the conservative dark money network controlled by former Federalist Society president Leonard Leo, and it backed the effort by Republican lawmakers in 2023 to make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution.
