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Ohio Elections Chief Looks To Register New Voters

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted
Statehouse News Bureau

If you have an Ohio driver’s license but are not registered to vote, you should be getting something in your mailbox soon from Ohio’s elections chief.

Secretary of State Jon Husted says the state’s voter rolls system is now linked with the Bureau of Motor Vehicles database, so he’s now able to make sure Ohio drivers can be voters if they want.

“We also are going to run all of the data that we have available, cross matching with the B.M.V., to say, “look, here are a million Ohioans who have driver’s licenses or state i.d.’s who are not registered to vote and we will mail them and ask them to register to vote.”

Husted has worked for getting access to the BMV database in an effort to maintain voter rolls. Husted has removed more than a million people from the voter rolls since 2011 because they have died, have multiple registrations or are inactive voters who haven’t shown up at the polls for years. Critics have said this “purging” has removed voters unfairly, which Husted denies.