COLUMBUS, Ohio — Early voting for the November election is less than a month away. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has entered formal election data sharing agreements with three other states. LaRose says the goal is to always have fair data-sharing in elections.
LaRose finalized voter-data sharing agreements with Florida, Virginia and West Virginia.
“We’re simply drawing in information from other states that help us maintain better voter rolls,” LaRose said. “And, to help us catch people that on rare occasions commit fraud.”
What You Need To Know
- Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose finalized voter-data sharing agreements with Florida, Virginia and West Virginia
- LaRose says Ohio is finalizing agreements with other states across the country
- LaRose says the goal is to maintain accurate, fair, and proper protocols around voter-data sharing
LaRose says the goal is to create a more fair system to prevent voter fraud from occurring in Ohio. The states will share their voting information and analyze records to find out if duplicate voter registrations exist in different states.
“What this really is about is creating greater transparency as it relates to the vast amounts of data that exist at a county board of elections,” LaRose said.
This will allow county boards of elections to electronically transfer election records to the Secretary of State’s office for review.
“It’s still controlled at the local level,” LaRose said. “It’s still a very decentralized system, but then puts them online so that you can look after an election and sort of balance the checkbook.”
This summer Ohio has been working on leading a national effort to modernize election sharing data across the country. It comes after LaRose pulled Ohio out of a national-data sharing system called ‘ERIC’, also known as the Electronic Registration Information Center. Nazek Hapasha, the Policy Affairs Manager at the League of Women Voters of Ohio, says ‘ERIC’ is a national standard.
“First of all, ‘ERIC’ is a bipartisan organization,” Hapasha said. “It has a track record of more than 10 years of doing excellent work with high security measures in place to make sure that data is not compromised. Even if the Secretary of State would have individual agreements with all of the other 49 states, it could be a highly inefficient process.”
LaRose said the new data sharing agreements will let Ohio deal directly with other states and this process is more cost-efficient than ‘ERIC.’
“We don’t need to create a third entity to manage our data,” LaRose said.”We can deal directly with these states. We can protect the integrity of that data. And to be clear, this is Ohio is responsible for Ohio’s voter registration rules.”
Larose said he is working to get other states to join Ohio’s data sharing effort, and the state has additional contracts they are also working toward.
