SOS Frank LaRose: Dead people shouldn’t be registered to vote

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has taken a position on registered voting that some groups want to portray as controversial: Dead people should no longer be registered to vote in Ohio.

So, the Buckeye State’s top election chief wants to remove their names from the voter rolls immediately.

While opponents are not arguing that those who have shuffled off this mortal coil should be able to still vote, they do caution against too aggressively removing the names of those who have passed into silence.

“As Ohio’s chief election officer, Secretary LaRose must ensure compliance with the National Voter Registration Act,” Freda Levenson, who serves as the legal director for the ACLU of Ohio, said in a previous release.

Far-left opponents like the ACLU of Ohio contend that the NVRA mandates a “notice-and-wait” procedure and a multi-year grace window before removal in many cases.

Vital to Election Security

LaRose said his latest order, Directive 2025-50, is part of an ongoing effort to strengthen routine list maintenance protocols and safeguard election integrity.

The directive ordered county boards of elections to remove “thousands of inactive voter registrations belonging to deceased Ohioans.” This directive was his response to recently being granted access to a new federal database.

This, according to LaRose’s office, uses “expanded federal data verification capabilities” to locate death records that were, until recently, unavailable to the state. The order cites newly available access to Social Security death reports and records through federal systems as the basis for the removals.

Ambitious orders like these are not new for LaRose. He has already published lists of inactive voter registrations for public review, including 352,389 registrations that were identified as ineligible and removed in March during routine maintenance.

An Unacceptable Risk?

Far-left activist groups in Ohio continue to warn without substantive evidence that aggressively purging voter rolls during rightful list maintenance poses an unacceptable risk of disenfranchising eligible voters and may end up violating federal law if the process is not done correctly.

In October 2024, several anti-election integrity groups, such as the ACLU of Ohio, the Brennan Center, the League of Women Voters of Ohio and Common Cause Ohio, sent a joint letter to LaRose. They urged him to slow the purging process because a few of the removals were “based on mass challenges to voter eligibility by third parties who have no personal knowledge about the voters, and are using unreliable data.”

LaRose has consistently taken these sorts of concerns into account when determining how best to protect democracy in Ohio. He has so far determined that such routine list maintenance, when done properly, will protect the integrity of Ohio’s elections by removing registrations that are obviously outdated, either because the voter has died or moved out of state.

Ohioans who believe they have been removed in error can review the status of their voter registration at the Ohio Secretary of State voter portal and re-register if eligible.