Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose said Thursday that Ohio lawmakers “absolutely” should consider expanding the limit on early in-person voting locations because a record number of Ohioans cast ballots that way in November.
Currently, Ohio law bans counties from offering more than one early-voting center. But the November election saw a shift away from mail voting and toward voting in person, including in rural areas. As of election night, 1.54 million people had cast early-in person ballots, 200,000 more than in 2020, despite a small drop in overall voter turnout.
Some of the largest increases came in rural areas, such as Adams County, Greene County and Logan County, as more Republicans adopted early-in person voting in response to a push from GOP party leaders.
“I was supportive of this when I was in the state legislature,” LaRose said. “But again, that’s a choice for to make but if they wanted to have multiple early voting locations, our boards of elections would be ready to to adapt to that change.
LaRose fielded questions from reporters on potential voting changes on Thursday at the Franklin County Board of Elections in Columbus, where elections workers were conducting their typical post-election audit, which involves randomly comparing electronic voting results with paper backups.
LaRose, the state’s top elections official, was there and held a press conference to emphasize the auditing process, which regularly finds votes were counted with greater than 99.8 percent accuracy.
LaRose enourages lawmakers to create “closed” primary system
He said that earlier in the day, he’d met with Matt Huffman, the current Republican leader of the Ohio Senate and soon-to-be speaker of the Ohio House. He said he emphasized that he’s not urging Republican lawmakers to make major changes to election law in the remaining “lame duck” session. That’s the name for the period after the election and before the end of the year, when lawmakers often quickly push through lingering bills.
In contrast, during the 2022 lame duck session, lawmakers passed a sweeping elections law that limited the state’s early voting period and set a hard photo ID requirement for in-person voters.
LaRose reiterated that in the new year he’d like to see lawmakers consider changes he’s previously encouraged, including changing Ohio to a “closed” primary election system. Under such a system, voters would have to declare a political party in advance to participate in that party’s primary election. LaRose also said lawmakers should consider requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship when filling out a state voter registration form.
LaRose previously floated the idea of banning ballot drop boxes, after a federal judge in October ordered the state to allow non-relatives to deliver completed absentee ballots on behalf of disabled voters. LaRose was noncommittal on the issue on Thursday.
“It’s really a relatively new phenomenon,” he said. “In many ways, they are more trouble than they’re worth, but if the General Assembly decides to get rid of them, I’m not going to oppose that.”
Read the decisions here:
