Ohio Secretary of State Refers 597 Noncitizens for Prosecution After Registering or Voting Illegally
Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced the referral of 597 noncitizens for possible prosecution after they were found to have either registered to vote or cast a ballot illegally.
This significant number, which surpasses previous years, underscores the ongoing efforts by Ohio’s Republican leadership to combat voter fraud and protect the sanctity of the ballot box.
Of these cases, 138 noncitizens were found to have illegally cast ballots, while another 459 registered to vote but did not participate in the election, according to AP.
These individuals were identified through a rigorous review process and have been referred to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost for further action. The numbers are telling: compared to 148 noncitizen cases referred in 2022, 117 in 2021, and 354 in 2019, it is clear that the state’s efforts to crack down on illegal voting are gaining momentum.
Secretary LaRose has been at the forefront of this battle, making voter integrity a cornerstone of his office’s mission. His recent audit of the state’s voter registration database resulted in the removal of nearly 155,000 outdated and inactive registrations, further ensuring that Ohio’s voter rolls remain accurate and up-to-date.
Appearing on War Room with Benjamin Harnwell, LaRose highlighted the challenges and successes of these efforts.
Below is the transcript:
Frank Laroze: We’re removing non-citizens from the voter rolls and actually referring them for prosecution because the law that’s not followed is… well, it’s not a law; it’s a suggestion. And so, if people break the law in Ohio, they’re going to face the consequences for it.
Benjamin Harnwell: Tell me a bit more about that because you gave an initial exposition, I think on Monday here on the show. Tell us some more about the process of removing people. How is that going? How are you identifying them, and how are you removing them?
Frank Laroze: Well, first of all, the process is much harder than it needs to be because of a lack of cooperation from the federal government. We’re using every resource we have, but it’s still not a full process that it could be.
If, for example, we’re able to pass Chip Roy’s SAVE Act, this process will improve dramatically. Because it’s so hard, because it involves so many different steps, a lot of other states are not bothering to do it. But we’ve had an all-hands-on-deck approach where we’ve worked with our State Bureau of Motor Vehicles. That’s the first filter that we go through.
Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles, when you get a state driver’s license or you get a state ID, we at that point establish your status. You’re either a citizen or a non-citizen. So we use that. With that, I was able to remove hundreds of non-citizens from the voter rolls. We then are left with some cases where we have a question. At one point, they were a non-citizen.
They may have naturalized since. If they did, if they’ve taken the oath of citizenship and done it the right way, we don’t want to pester them. And so, we then go through the federal SAVE database, and they charge us a fee to use that.
We have to manually enter all of these. We have to get what’s called an alien registration number in order to do it. We have to notify this individual by mail that we’re searching their status. But then that helped us take another few hundred off the voter rolls. And then we’re still left with some that we have a question about. For those, I sent a round of mailings to them.
I said, “Listen, I want to know if you’re a citizen, tell me. If you’re not a citizen, please understand that you are risking being charged with a felony, which makes you subject to immediate deportation. So don’t mess around with this. Don’t mess around and find out, because if you are a non-citizen, you should remove your voter registration right now.”
And we’ve gotten some good responses from that as well, as well as some hand-wringing from people saying, “Oh, this is suppressing the vote.” It’s no such thing. We’re simply trying to establish who’s a citizen and who’s not because Ohio’s Constitution requires it, and federal law requires it.
WATCH:
.@FrankLaRose Discusses Identifying AND Eliminating Illegal Alien Votes For This Upcoming Election pic.twitter.com/fWiehQDIA9
— BannonsWarRoom (@Bannons_WarRoom) August 22, 2024
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