Ohio voter registrations are down

Ohio voter registrations are down as the state faces what may be one of the most consequential midterm elections in modern history. The decline follows four years of new laws passed by the Republican legislature making it harder to register and harder to vote.

Registrations as of Oct. 26 were down 52,562 from 2018, the last midterm election before the legislature began a series of election-law changes. The numbers come from the Ohio secretary of state’s voter registration dashboard and database of previous elections.

The decline in registrations is going the opposite direction from Ohio’s population.

The eligible citizen voting-age population in Ohio grew by at least 111,564 from 2018 to 2023, according to the latest estimates in the Federal Register. 

Combining the population growth and registration decline reveals a disappearance of more than 164,000 potential voters. In 2012, Barack Obama won Ohio by only 166,000 votes.

Even more startling is that in 2008 — a presidential election year and the economy was in a deep slide — Ohio hit its highest voter registration of 8.29 million. Today’s registrations are 737,178 lower. Kamala Harris lost to Trump in Ohio in 2024 by 641,000.

The U.S. Elections Project, a pro-voter rights organization, ranked Ohio 12th in the nation in 2008 for voter participation and in 2024 the state had fallen to 24th.

The declining voter participation raises questions as to whether it is purposeful.  Multiple requests for explanations, public records and an interview with the state’s chief elections officer, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, have been acknowledged but unanswered since Sept. 13. 

Public statements and available records show that as they enacted restrictions on voting, LaRose and the legislature echoed Donald Trump’s false claims of rigged elections and voter fraud.

LaRose in the last five years has made claims of more than 1,200 instances of voter fraud in Ohio, though the Ohio attorney general’s own website shows only 16 felony convictions for illegal voting or registration in the last 10 years, out of about 35 million votes cast.

Public records obtained by pro-democracy groups over the last few years show that LaRose’s office met often with State Sen. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, to discuss election-law changes. Among the legislative changes were:

• In Gavarone’s Senate Elections Committee in December 2022, a seemingly innocuous bill was rewritten to require proof of citizenship to register to vote — proof that for many people was difficult to obtain. Ohioans also must prove citizenship again to vote by presenting photo identification. 
• In February 2023 Gavarone introduced two bills that the Ohio Capital Journal identified as “priority voting measures” for LaRose. One created an election integrity unit within the Secretary of State’s office and the other required universal and more comprehensive voter-registration data among the 88 counties, a bill that LaRose said had been written with the help of the America First Policy Institute — a Trump-in-exile organization. 
• In 2025, Gavarone introduced legislation that has the potential for aiding Trump’s attempts to interfere with mail-in ballots. It eliminated the grace period to accept mail-in ballots. Previously, ballots postmarked by election day had four days to arrive and be counted. She cited Trump’s 2025 executive order requiring that mail-in ballots must arrive no later than election night as a reason for the bill. Other states went to court to block Trump’s order — and won in the U.S. Supreme Court. If the law had been in effect in 2024, 20,896 ballots would have been incinerated rather than counted. 
• The same bill required the secretary of state to conduct monthly comparisons of voter registrations against federal records rather than once-a-year registration audits. The law required the immediate purge of people suspected of being noncitizens, which the League of Women Voters and ACLU argue may violate federal voting rights law.

LaRose also actively opposed a national voter registration initiative that could have helped reverse Ohio’s decline. 

Immediately after taking office in 2021, President Joseph Biden issued an executive order to federal agencies to help states increase voter registration – if the states wanted the help. Agencies also were to review ways to encourage participation in democracy.

In the final months before the Harris-Trump 2024 election, LaRose joined with former Trump White House aide Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute to sue the administration claiming that Biden had exceeded his constitutional authority. Only one state was on the initial complaint, Ohio. The case was filed in Texas and three Texas lawmakers were included as plaintiffs. 

The America First news release about the lawsuit quoted LaRose as saying that Biden’s order “is a cynical attempt to turn government agencies into a Democratic turnout machine, and it’s wrong. That’s why I’m joining this lawsuit and working to hold the administration accountable.” 

To represent Ohio, LaRose hired a former Trump Department of Justice lawyer who in 2020-21 was instrumental in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The lawyer was Kenneth Klukowski, then in the D.C. law firm of Schaerr Jaffe and a former legal analyst for Breitbart. In December 2020, Klukowski was hired into the Trump Department of Justice to work for Jeffrey Clarke, who attempted to usurp leadership of the Department of Justice.

Together, Klukowski and Clarke crafted letters telling state legislatures that they could replace Biden electors with Trump slates and overturn the election, according to Congressional testimony by Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming. 

The suit over the federal voter-registration initiative was dropped after Trump was elected and he rescinded the executive order.

In contrast, when Trump issued executive orders demanding that all states turn over their voter rolls so that his administration could control who votes by mail, LaRose complied. Thirty states refused, 26 have won in court and the others are still in litigation, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Polling shows Americans and Ohioans are growing impatient with corruption, the cost of living,  existential threats from artificial intelligence, war and the loss of healthcare benefits. Trump’s approval rating is the lowest for any president prior to a midterm election since 1946.

With billionaires and cryptocurrency backers spending at least $500 million on Ohio’s senate and gubernatorial races, the GOP super majority in the state legislature in question and the balance of Congress at stake, concerns are mounting about how Trump and Republicans might interfere if Ohioans are in a mood for change. 

Trump has already filed suit to block the Alaska U.S. Senate election, but only if his candidate loses, and his administration has dispatched federal agents to immigrant neighborhoods looking for potential voter fraud.

Pro-voting-rights groups have organized intervention teams for a variety of election-interference scenarios but also stress that individual ballots are secure and the local voting process has worked smoothly for decades.

 “One of the things here in Ohio is that we have the benefit of bipartisan local boards of elections. It’s a huge safeguard,” said Steve David, Ohio director of All Voting is Local, a pro-voter-rights organization. He said that Ohio’s boards of elections are generally high-functioning, collegial organizations of two Republicans and two Democrats. 

His group has spent years attending board meetings and building trust relationships, he said.

On occasion, there can be a tie vote at the local level and the tie is broken by the secretary of state. “The secretary of state can advance a false narrative to invalidate votes,” he warned. 

Asked about LaRose specifically, he said LaRose has aligned himself with a “harmful narrative” coming out of the current government. “One of the things I would point to is that he says Ohio runs good elections but there are problems elsewhere, which creates an atmosphere of doubt….. Because LaRose casts doubt, it hurts election workers in our own state.”

Doug Oplinger is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who worked at the Akron Beacon Journal. Oplinger can be contacted at [email protected]