Ohio Secretary of State says Biden admin, leftist groups are pushing back on voter roll audits
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose detailed efforts by the Biden-Harris administration and liberal groups to push back on audits of voter rolls across the country ahead of Election Day.
LaRose highlighted his own lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) aimed at forcing the administration to share data he says would help identify non-citizens who are registered to vote. The ACLU and other left-leaning groups have also challenged efforts to clean up voter rolls in Ohio and other states.
"It should come as no surprise that the irresponsible Biden-Harris administration, who has thrown open the doors on the southern border; who has allowed our nation to be invaded in many ways… are also not allowing me as an election official to access data to prove that only American citizens are able to vote," LaRose said.
"It's shocking, and they left me no choice but to sue them," he added.
The lawsuit claims there were four instances in which Ohio's requests for access to federal Person Centric Query Service (PCQS) and Central Index System 2 (CIS2) records were ignored or denied.
"On October 10, 2024, nearly three months after first requesting assistance, Secretary LaRose received a response from DHS. The letter claimed that Ohio’s access to the SAVE program was sufficient—despite Ohio’s previous letters explaining why SAVE is largely useless here because Ohio lacks the identifiers needed to find specific individuals in SAVE," the lawsuit reads.
Ohio's ongoing search for wrongful voter registrations relies on analysis and cross-checks against records provided by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the DHS Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, the Social Security Administration, federal jury pool data and other resources.
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While LaRose's office can access the SAVE database, states using it have to pay $1.50 for each query for records, and finding the information required to properly search the data is cumbersome, LaRose says.
The PCQS data the Biden administration has declined to share would provide a more comprehensive picture of whether any non-citizens remain registered to vote in Ohio, LaRose says.
When reached for comment by Fox News Digital, a DHS spokesperson said they are "engaged with Ohio and will continue to correspond with them directly through official channels."
The DHS also pushed back on LaRose claim that the additional federal data would be helpful.
"A manual review of hundreds of thousands of records by the PCQS only allows users to submit one query at a time and would still not lead to a definitive result. Moreover, it would not be an efficient or accurate way to verify U.S. citizenship," the DHS said.
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"PCQS returns aggregated results across many different immigration systems for a single query at a time. Use of PCQS would require manual review of the results in each case to determine immigration status, as the systems may return disparate or conflicting results. As such, PCQS is not an option for state and local agencies to use for voter verification purpose," it added.
LaRose went on to detail efforts by liberal groups to block the removal of registrations.
"Just yesterday we won a major lawsuit in federal court where the ACLU sued me – this sounds like something that's in the Babylon Bee – they sued me to say that we should accept non-citizen ID cards and then just allow people to vote without any citizenship verification."
"Thankfully, common sense prevailed and the ACLU lost that. Of course, if your state-issued driver's license says ‘non-citizen’ on it, we're not going to simply hand you a ballot. We're gonna ask for you to verify your citizenship," he added.
The ACLU's lawsuit pertained to naturalized citizens attempting to vote with an ID that labeled them a non-citizen due to it being obtained prior to their naturalization. The ACLU argued such citizens should be able to affirm their naturalization on a government document at the polling site, while LaRose argued such an individual must provide their naturalization documents before casting a ballot.
"Requiring naturalized citizens to bring additional documentation to verify their eligibility to vote is not only burdensome and discriminatory, it’s unlawful," Freda Levenson, legal director of the ACLU of Ohio, said of the suit.
A federal judge sided with LaRose on the issue last week.
LaRose added that the Justice Department has also sued states for attempting to remove bad registrations. Such DOJ lawsuits accuse state officials of violating the federally mandated "quiet period" that prohibits the systematic removal of registered voters within 90 days of Election Day.
The DOJ sued Virginia earlier in October in exactly this fashion, though the Supreme Court sided with state officials in a ruling last week.