In early June, Secretary of State Frank LaRose released a list of almost 160,000 inactive Ohioan voters who are set to be removed from the Statewide Voter Registration Database in a purge. Individuals on the list had until July 22 to contact their local board of election to be removed from the list.
“These registrations are eligible for removal under the law because records show they’re no longer residing or active at the registered address for at least the last four consecutive years,” LaRose said in a statement. Voters can be removed from their county’s voter registration if they filled out a change-of-address form or if they have an inactive registration after four years.
Almost 400 of those 160,000 are at a single address: 2100 Lakeside Ave., the site of the largest homeless shelter in both Cleveland and Ohio.
“States have to do maintenance of their voter rolls; states can’t allow the voter rolls to just keep expanding and expanding without doing any maintenance,” said Bishop Chui, the executive director of non-partisan grassroots organization Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates, also known as NOVA.
But while the effort to remove inactive registrations from the voter rolls might be necessary to keep accuracy, it does disproportionately target low-income people—specifically Ohioans who are homeless, have unstable housing or use shelter, service center, or treatment center addresses to register. With transiency issues and irregular use of mail, those at 2100 Lakeside are more likely than others to be unaware of their impending status.
“Oftentimes people who are houseless kind of get lost in the system and we don’t know where they are for a period of time. Maybe they were arrested in their county, they went to stay with a relative in another city. In some cases, they passed away,” Chui said.
Other shelters and nonprofits that serve the homeless have over 100 voters on the list, including 66 at the Norma Herr Women’s Center, located at 2227 Payne Ave. in Cleveland.
“What we’re focusing on is communicating with those homeless shelters, those agencies and those outreach workers that come in contact with people who are houseless and trying to obtain their registrations that way,” Chui said.
Voters who are purged can re-register before the upcoming election.
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