Ohio’s chief elections officer is asking prosecutors around the state to investigate 17 people who voted in Ohio during the 2012 election. Secretary of State Jon Husted says those voters were not legal U-S citizens.
"There were 17 non-citizens who voted in the 2012 general elections and 274 non-citizens that are registered to vote but did not cast a ballot."
Husted says his office discovered this in the process of cleaning up voter rolls in Ohio by crosschecking them with the database at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Democratic State Representative Kathleen Clyde says she has no problem with the Secretary of State using the Bureau of Motor Vehicles database to crosscheck information for the purpose of verifying voter registrations. But she says the state needs to be careful as to how it uses BMV files when it comes to actual voting because problems with the unwieldy system could keep someone from voting. Clyde says it’s important to remember there are far more people who are qualified to vote who are unable to cast ballots. She notes seventeen cases of potential fraud are a very small number when you consider more than 5.6 million ballots were cast in the November 2012 election.