Ohio is one of 11 states that will be sharing data about voter registrations in an effort to ensure voter roll integrity. The new program called EleXa comes two years after Ohio left the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which had helped nearly 30 states with voter roll accuracy since 2019.
Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose said the states involved in the EleXa will remove illegal or ineligible voters identified through formal cross-state election data sharing agreements.
“If somebody attempts to vote in Ohio and vote in another state, they are violating the law, and if they mess around, they’ll find out. We’ll catch them," LaRose said in an interview.
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia have data-sharing agreements in place with Ohio. Pennsylvania is finalizing its agreement.
LaRose said it's not common for people to vote in two states in the same election.
“When elections comes down to a very small number of votes, typically in a local contest, we are not going to turn a blind eye even to rare forms of voter fraud," LaRose said. "And this is also about reassuring Ohioans that we are making sure that every legal vote counts and that no illegal votes are counted.”
LaRose said that when it has happened, it is usually because the voter has financial ties in two states: “In many cases, it may deal with somebody who owns property in two states, and so they somehow feel justified in voting in both of those states even though the law clearly doesn’t allow that.”
In 2023, Ohio left the national voter database ERIC after it became the focus of Republican conspiracy theories.
League of Women Voters of Ohio Executive Director Jen Miller said this data sharing could be a good idea if it is done properly.
“Exactly how these individuals are being flagged, the quality of the data and the process of notifying these individuals is incredibly important," Miller said. “What we do not want is eligible Ohioans to be removed from the rolls for bad data but other than that, if the system does as it is supposed to do and it is accurate, that would be a positive.”
Voter fraud is extremely rare, in Ohio and nationally. In October LaRose announced he'd found 1,084 alleged cases of noncitizens who registered to vote, including 167 people who allegedly voted in a federal election going back to 2018. There are more than eight million registered voters in Ohio.
