Sensitive voter data should not be handed over lightly

Ohio’s chief elections officer, Frank LaRose, who frequently touts Ohio’s elections as the most secure in the nation, recently turned Ohio’s full voter rolls over to the Trump administration – no questions asked.

This includes information from over 8 million state-issued IDs, as well as partial Social Security numbers. Turning over this information instead of just publicly-available versions, like a majority of states did, means that Ohioans’ sensitive information will be made available to the Department of Homeland Security, to be matched against a U.S. citizenship check.

This may seem to be in keeping with the solution-in-search-of-a-problem SAVE Act in its supposed goal of preventing non-citizens from voting. However, for one thing, non-citizens attempt to vote in statistically insignificant numbers.

The ultraconservative Heritage Foundation (the people who spearheaded Project 2025) found only 77 cases of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023, each of which was properly investigated.

For another thing, the confusingly named SAVE System used by DHS to check voter citizenship has a well-documented history of mistakenly flagging citizens – over 2,500 of them in Texas last October, just as an example – and purging them from voter rolls unless they respond to a request for proof of citizenship within 30 days. In this case, the supposed solution to an imagined problem is creating actual problems.

Should the current SAVE Act pass the Senate, it would mandate states to perform voter purges like what happened in Texas last October every 30 days. This would lead to thousands more eligible citizens being forced to prove their citizenship, in person, with documents that not everyone has on hand, and which cost time and money to obtain.

Ohio’s Senators Husted and Moreno are currently championing the SAVE Act as necessary. They need to hear from us that it is unconstitutional, unnecessary, and unwanted.

Kari Sommers

Dover