LaRose’s Smoking Gun on Voter Purging

Another Round of Ohio’s Horrible Process--and a Long, Brutal Trail of Voter Suppression

Ohio’s Secretary of State is launching another round of purging infrequent voters from Ohio’s rolls. This time, 157,857 Ohio voters are on the list “to be purged.” (I provide a link below on how to check if you’ve been purged—and believe me, you’ll want to check after reading this).

** CHECK YOUR STATUS BELOW **

But amid this latest round of purging, the Secretary of State tweeted something this week that again confirmed just how disastrous this process has been over the last decade-plus.

Here’s what he had to say:

Then he followed the first tweet with this:

What Frank doesn’t tell you as he attacks voter advocacy groups is that when he says “bad registrations,” that includes Ohioans who have simply not voted in several cycles. And that the Secretary of State’s process in identifying these infrequent voters has proven to be rife with errors.

In fact, a few years ago, when he released a similar list of voters “to be purged,” the outside groups he now criticizes found that the list included 40,000 voters on it in error. That’s right—his staff didn’t find the errors, these outside groups did.

40,000 of them!

It turns out, these voters had voted regularly (or engaged in other political activity that should’ve kept them off the purge list), hadn’t moved, hadn’t passed away, but they were tagged to be purged anyway. Even the president of the Ohio League of Women Voters was found on the list!

Overall, it amounted to a near 20% error rate:

Now, 20% inaccuracy, in any field, is terrible.

But when it comes to voters being purged from the rolls at the scale we’re talking about, 20% is downright stomach churning. And potentially outcome-changing in a state that was a swing state not that long ago.

So no, Frank, it’s not hyperbole or “cheap political points” to be alarmed by the appallingly high error rate in your process. “Irresponsible” would actually be looking the other way.

And speaking of irresponsible…

When those groups found this 20% error rate, LaRose blamed others—pointing fingers at vendors and suggesting local county boards of elections were to blame for the mistakes. He later acknowledged that the process was flawed: “The system we have in place right now is prone to error — human error, vendor error…It’s unacceptably messy.”

Given his own admissions of problems, groups logically insisted that the planned purge not go forward. I was chair of the Democratic Party then, and we went to court (unsuccessfully) to stop the imminent purge. But despite how clear it was that the purging process was wildly inaccurate and “unacceptably messy” in ways even LaRose admitted, LaRose stubbornly proceeded to purge voters anyway.

And exactly as we had warned, more voters were later found to have been purged in error. Again, identified by newspapers and outside groups and lawmakers like state Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney:

Now tell us who the irresponsible one is, Frank.

So it’s in that broader context that people are, rightfully, highly skeptical of any other purges. Including the newly scheduled purge, coming only months before a critical election where so much is on the Ohio ballot.

The Smoking Gun?

So why do I call LaRose’s tweet from above a “smoking gun”?

It’s not the snarky tweet where he criticizes the very groups who caught his errors last time. It’s actually the second tweet I’m referring to.

Here it is again:

That’s right…he wrote the words that his purging process is “more accurate[]” than before.

Now that’s a hell of a way to put it.

First, “more accurate” doesn’t impress me when it comes to voter suppression. It’s either accurate or it’s not. If it’s not, voters are being purged in error.

Even worse, by admitting to past inaccuracy, it’s yet another admission of how flawed the process has been over time. And that admission really matters when you realize just how giant the scale of this process has been time.

At least two million Ohio voters have been purged over the past decade-plus. Almost all of those purges took place from lists that were never seen, and therefore never scanned for mistakes, in advance. And if the current Secretary of State’s process is more accurate than before, that likely means that the 20% error rate is the floor as to how inaccurate the process was over all that time.

Do the math. Two million purged. That means that the number of Ohioans purged over a decade is at least in the 100,000s—perhaps up to 500,000 mistakenly purged. Perhaps more.

And that stunning figure constitutes a brutal attack on Ohio’s electorate and democracy over all this time. Made even worse when the data also makes clear that the process disproportionately purged voters in our urban counties, major cities and communities of color. As I explained in Laboratories of Autocracy:

• “From 2008 to 2020, despite robust registration drives in each presidential election (which re-registered many purged voters), total registrations were down in Ohio’s six largest counties by more than 225,000 votes, even though, according to the Census, those counties’ populations had together grown by more than 100,000 people.”

• “Cuyahoga, the most important county in Obama’s 2008 and 2012 wins, fell 20%, tumbling from over 1.1 million registered voters to 888,000, even as its population declined by less than five percent. Those “lost” voters totaled 90% of Obama’s margin of victory in the county in 2012, and that was the county that had made the difference between him winning and losing Ohio.”

• “Even more important, these large counties saw an especially steep decline in core urban areas. For example, Cleveland’s registered voter count fell by almost 33% between 2008 and 2020; East Cleveland fell by almost 50%, from more than 20,000 voters to under 11,000…”

• “By 2016 and still more in 2020, most of Ohio’s largest cities were well below the number of registered voters from 2008: Cleveland, down 120,000 voters; Cincinnati, down 20,000 voters; Dayton, down 17,000; Akron, down 10,000.”

Amid all this disproportionate impact on communities of color, LaRose’s tweet now admits that the inaccuracy of the process was either as bad or worse than the 20%.

So, given his admission, he now should be asked: how much worse was it?

• If they have improved things, what else did they do wrong over all those years? What were all the problems that needed to be addressed?

• Have they gone back and scanned all those old purge lists to see how many Ohioans were wrongly purged? Out of the 2 million-plus? Over an entire decade? In a state that was a swing state before all these errors and purges took place?

• Did the errors reflect the same disproportionate impact that purging has had overall on voters of color, and other communities and groups?

• How many voters were turned away at the polls incorrectly?

• Shouldn’t anyone wrongly pushed be automatically reinstated now?

• Will there be any accountability for all these errors?

I think these are required questions, don’t you?

LaRose is basically saying: “Oops, we’ll do better next time round.”

But there shouldn’t be mulligans when it comes to this level of massive voter suppression.

And Still Not Doing It Right…

One other thing: LaRose now touts his release of a new list as a sign of transparency.

But what he again doesn’t tell you is that the way he releases these lists—without the Secretary of State’s voter identifier numbers included—makes it far more difficult for the outside groups to scan and sort these lists quickly and broadly to find the type of systematic mistakes they have found in the past.

So yes, individual voters can and should go here to see if they’ve been purged.

Please do so and encourage others to do the same by going HERE.

But LaRose’s data team should also release the list in a way that best allows outside groups to quickly search for and find the mass mistakes that LaRose’s team made in the recent past…and which he now admits were even worse previously.

Not doing that is another bad sign about this entire, rotten process. Just another hurdle in protecting Ohio voters from this antiquated and poorly conceived process.

End the Nightmare:

Finally, there’s an easy way to correct all this for good. And end this nightmare of suppression.

These days, there are lists generated on a regular basis of Ohioans who have moved and Ohioans who have passed away: those are the triggering events for a voter to be removed from voting rolls.

So of course the Secretary of States should use those lists to keep Ohio’s voting rolls updated and clean, as most states do.

But an approach that treats infrequent voting as a proxy for who’s moved and/or passed away (which the Ohio system does) is a fatally flawed system—guaranteeing that far more people will be caught up in the purging process (about 50% or more choose not to vote in most elections, versus small percentages who pass away or move) than should be. The “proxy” of infrequent voting opens the door to mass purging of Ohio voters, along with all the errors Ohio has experienced.

So:

• Check to be sure you haven’t been purged. Again, do so HERE.

• Demand that LaRose release a list that groups can more easily search. You can contact his office HERE.

• Thank and support those groups as they do this important work.

• And demand, long term, that Ohio cease purging infrequent voters once and for all. There are ways to keep your rolls updated without such an antiquated and flawed process. (LaRose won’t do so, but demand it in every future election).