Voter registrations in Ohio have decreased since 2018, according to data from the Ohio secretary of state’s voter registration dashboard and database of previous elections. As of Oct. 26, registrations were down 52,562 from 2018, the last midterm election before the legislature began a series of election-law changes.
The decline in registrations is going the opposite direction from Ohio’s population. The eligible citizen voting-age population in Ohio grew by at least 111,564 from 2018 to 2023, according to the latest estimates in the Federal Register. Combining the population growth and registration decline reveals a disappearance of more than 164,000 potential voters.
In 2008, Ohio hit its highest voter registration of 8.29 million. Today’s registrations are 737,178 lower. Kamala Harris lost to Trump in Ohio in 2024 by 641,000.
The U.S. Elections Project, a pro-voter rights organization, ranked Ohio 12th in the nation in 2008 for voter participation and in 2024 the state had fallen to 24th. The declining voter participation raises questions as to whether it is purposeful.
Multiple requests for explanations, public records and an interview with the state’s chief elections officer, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, have been acknowledged but unanswered since Sept. 13. Public statements and available records show that as they enacted restrictions on voting, LaRose and the legislature echoed Donald Trump’s false claims of rigged elections and voter fraud.
LaRose in the last five years has made claims of more than 1,200 instances of voter fraud in Ohio, though the Ohio attorney general’s own website shows only 16 felony convictions for illegal voting or registration in the last 10 years, out of about 35 million votes cast.
Public records obtained by pro-democracy groups over the last few years show that LaRose’s office met often with State Sen. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, to discuss election-law changes. Among the legislative changes were: In Gavarone’s Senate Elections Committee in December 2022, a seemingly innocuous bill was rewritten to require proof of citizenship to register to vote – proof that for many people was difficult to obtain. Ohioans also must prove citizenship again to vote by presenting photo identification.
In February 2023 Gavarone introduced two bills that the Ohio Capital Journal identified as “priority voting measures” for LaRose. One created an election integrity unit within the Secretary of State’s office and the other required universal and more comprehensive voter-registration data among the 88 counties, a bill that LaRose said had been written with the help of the America First Policy Institute – a Trump-in-exile organization.
In 2025, Gavarone introduced legislation that has the potential for aiding Trump’s attempts to interfere with mail-in ballots. It eliminated the grace period to accept mail-in ballots. Previously, ballots postmarked by election day had four days to arrive and be counted. She cited Trump’s 2025 executive order requiring that mail-in ballots must arrive no later than election night as a reason for the bill.
Other states went to court to block Trump’s order – and won in the U.S. Supreme Court. If the law had been in effect in 2024, 20,896 ballots would have been incinerated rather than counted. The same bill required the secretary of state to conduct monthly comparisons of voter registrations against federal records rather than once-a-year registration audits. The law required the immediate purge of people suspected of being noncitizens, which the League of Women Voters and ACL
