Ohio bill proposes automatic voter registration
By Marc Kovac
COLUMBUS
Residents would be registered to vote automatically when seeking driver’s licenses or interacting with other state agencies under legislation planned in the Ohio House and Senate.
The bills also would allow online voter registration and automatically register graduating high-school students.
The proposed law changes will be offered by Rep. Kathleen Clyde, D-Kent, and Sen. Kenny Yuko, D-Cleveland, who said in statements Friday the legislation would add more than a million Ohioans to the state’s voter rolls.
“It’s 2015, and with all the technology we have at our disposal, there is no good reason not to modernize our voter-registration system,” Clyde said. “We can easily make a list of all eligible voters in our state. ... Ohio lags the highest-voter-turnout states by 10 percentage points. We aim to fix that.”
Clyde and other lawmakers have offered similar legislation in past general assemblies. Oregon recently enacted automatic voter registration, becoming the first state to do so.
“I think that both Democrats and Republicans should consider bringing this modernization to the state of Ohio,” Clyde said.
Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted, a vocal proponent of online voter registration, is not supporting the legislation, however.
“We want people to vote, and we want people to participate, but we have to face the fact that not everyone wants to participate and not everyone wants to be on the voter rolls,” Josh Eck, Husted’s spokesman, said in a statement. “This is nothing more than another misguided case of ‘government knows best,’ where they want to create undue chaos and increase costs by sticking millions more people on the voter rolls who may not even want to be there.”
But Clyde said her bill would enable residents to opt out of the automatic registration.
“[This legislation] deserves serious consideration by the Ohio Legislature and Secretary Husted,” she said.