League of Women Voters vs. LaRose (SB293)

On December 19, 2025, Governor Mike DeWine signed Ohio Senate Bill 293 into law. The effective date of the legislation is March 20, 2026. SB 293 makes major changes to the voter list maintenance program undertaken by Ohio’s Secretary of State in coordination with Ohio’s county boards of elections. Among its key changes, the law requires a database matching and removal program to be performed monthly using the BMV (Bureau of Motor Vehicles) and SAVE (Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements) databases’ information on citizenship status.

Ohio currently has just over 7.9 million registered voters, including tens of thousands who have already registered since the start of this calendar year. As of 2022, approximately 4% of those registered voters—roughly 300,000 Ohioans—were naturalized citizens. In fiscal year 2022 alone, over 16,000 Ohioans naturalized as U.S. citizens, and over 60,000 did so between 2016 and 2020.

Ohio law allows both U.S. citizens and lawfully present noncitizens of Ohio to obtain Ohio driver licenses and state ID cards. Holders of a Permanent Resident Card, commonly known as a green card, can obtain a “regular Ohio driver license” upon producing proof of their legal presence and Ohio residency, and the ID “will expire in four years or eight years depending on the applicant’s choice and qualification.”

Ohio’s BMV maintains a database system that stores personal information about driver license and state ID card (non-driver ID) holders. This includes the following pieces of information: name; date of birth; social security number; card type; whether a person is a U.S. citizen; and whether a U.S. passport/passport card or naturalization document were presented for citizenship verification during the person’s interaction with the BMV.

In January 2023, Ohio enacted a law requiring newly issued Ohio driver licenses and state ID cards to denote the holder’s citizenship status, designating them either as a U.S. citizen or as a non-U.S. citizen. Within just over two years after the since the law took effect, as of July 2025, the BMV reported that nearly 300,000 Ohioans had a driver license or state ID card indicating they are a non-citizen rather than a U.S. citizen. The BMV does not automatically update an individual’s citizenship status when they naturalize; updates occur only if the individual self-reports a change or during their driver license or state ID card renewal.

Although tens of thousands of Ohioans naturalize each year, Ohio law does not require newly naturalized citizens to update their driver license or state ID card to reflect their U.S. citizenship until the card expires, which occurs every four or eight years. Many Ohioans do not undertake burdens of obtaining a new license or ID card before its expiration when the State does not obligate them to do so. Thus, many Ohioans who registered to vote as naturalized citizens are still recorded as noncitizens in the BMV database. The BMV system therefore suffers from significant lags in updating driver license- and state ID card-holder citizenship status because it relies on stale data, especially for naturalized citizens. For example, green card holders who naturalize and become U.S. citizens within the four- or eight-year window after obtaining an Ohio driver license or state ID card may still be listed in the BMV system as noncitizen green card holders, even though they have become U.S. citizens and are eligible to vote.

The SAVE system has similar built-in lags in naturalization information, as well as other accuracy problems.

The SAVE system was created in the 1980s and has historically been used by federal, state, and local officials for citizenship inquiries related to public benefits, which were conducted on an individual basis using DHS immigration identification numbers, names, and
birth dates.

In recent years, some states have begun using SAVE to attempt to verify the citizenship of people on their voter rolls, but they have run into severe accuracy issues. For example, the North Carolina State Board of Elections determined in its audit of the 2016 election that, “based on past experience,” a “match with the SAVE database is not a reliable indicator that a person is not a U.S. citizen because the database is not always updated in a timely manner and individuals who derived citizenship from their parents through naturalization or adoption may show up as non-citizens in SAVE.”

Last year, the federal government purportedly reconfigured SAVE to allow searches through social security numbers (instead of only DHS numbers) and for such searches to be able to be performed in bulk. These new attempts to use social security data and to link information from SAVE with that in other databases have presented new issues on top of the preexisting ones, particularly in using the data for voter list maintenance purposes.

In October of 2025, for example, DHS itself disclosed that there was a risk that, through SAVE, “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [(“USCIS”)] may share inaccurate information with registered agencies, which could in turn impact a registered user agency’s eligibility determination for an individual … due to misspelling of names, transposed numbers,
or incomplete information”—a risk that it could only partially mitigate.

In addition, any data that the Social Security Administration (“SSA”) may now be sharing with SAVE likely only reflects a person’s citizenship status when they applied for a social security number.

Ohio law also contains a citizenship verification process that SB 293 will nearly entirely replace once it goes into effect. This pre-existing process contained protections against improper removal and provided for reinstatement if cancellation was in error—all of which is
removed under SB 293.

Ohio’s prior use of BMV and SAVE data for voter-roll maintenance underscores the systems’ accuracy concerns. In 2024, Secretary LaRose began using a combination of BMV and SAVE data to identify individuals for potential removal who had “twice confirmed their non-citizenship status to the BMV” but subsequently appeared on the voter registration rolls. Because many of these voters had naturalized and registered to vote since they last confirmed non-citizen status to the BMV these purge efforts targeted numerous eligible, registered voters solely on the basis of their status as naturalized citizens.

Unsurprisingly, some naturalized citizens who received the notice letters—which warned of further investigation and potential purges—were, in fact, eligible voters, and they reported feeling threatened and shocked by the letters’ language, which “threaten[ed] jail time if [the registrant] had registered illegally.

Prior to SB 293’s enactment, there were already processes for checking the citizenship status of registered voters under Ohio and federal law: the NVRA’s attestation requirement and Ohio’s own statutory process.

The NVRA requires state and federal voter registration forms to “include a statement that (A) specifies each eligibility requirement (including citizenship); (B) contains an attestation that the applicant meets each such requirement; and (C) requires the signature of the applicant, under penalty of perjury.” In other words, every registered Ohioan has attested to their status as a U.S. citizen upon registering to vote under penalty of perjury.

Under pre-existing law, the Secretary was required to review annually the statewide voter registration database to “identify persons who appear not to be United States citizens” by comparing the database with information received by the BMV showing that the individual provided documentation to the BMV that they were not a citizen both before and after registering to vote.

In addition to the pre-existing scheme for checking citizenship status, Ohio law already contains severe penalties for noncitizen voting that deter fraudulent registration and voting. Any individual who votes or attempts to vote in an Ohio or federal election in which they are “not a legally qualified elector” is guilty of a felony of the fourth degree, carrying up to 18 months of imprisonment (six months minimum) and a fine up to $5,000. Likewise, knowingly registering to vote when one is not a qualified voter is a fifth degree felony under Ohio law, carrying a term of imprisonment of up to 12 months and a $2,500 fine.

SB 293 removes prior protections that minimized erroneous removals of naturalized citizens. And it is only after the voter’s registration is cancelled that the individual receives a notice from their county board of elections informing them of the cancellation, the reason for the cancellation, and the option to “contact the board of elections to correct the error.” Thus, both the notice and any opportunity to respond occur only after the individual has been deprived of their interest in being registered to vote.

An individual whose registration was cancelled and who seeks to correct an error would need to file an application for the correction of a precinct registration list with their county board of elections “not later than the thirtieth day before the day of the election,” aligning with Ohio’s general voter registration deadline. Therefore, it appears that if a previously registered voter whose registration has been cancelled misses the 30-day deadline to request a hearing with the county board of elections—or if their registration is canceled within the 30-day window, which SB 293 not only enables, but requires—then the individual may be deprived of the right to vote in Ohio.

Although SB 293 provides that a voter’s registration cancelled in error will be restored as if never cancelled, it does not purport to override the 30-day window. As a result, an individual whose registration is erroneously cancelled after the voter registration deadline may have no timely recourse to restore it and would instead be forced to rely on casting a provisional ballot, which requires providing documentary proof of citizenship within four days following the Election and, if the individual’s name has changed, additional “proof of the change of name, such as a copy of a marriage license or court order,”—all with the hope that their provisional ballot will ultimately be counted.

SB 293 violates the National Voter Registration Act because it mandates a systematic voter removal program for reasons other than death, criminal conviction, or by request of the registrant within 90 days of a federal election and because it uses databases that will result in greatly disproportionate rates of eligible naturalized citizens being purged from the voter rolls, rendering the State’s voter list maintenance program neither uniform nor nondiscriminatory. SB 293 also violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause because it authorizes the State to deprive eligible voters of their liberty interest in their vote without providing adequate notice and an opportunity to be heard or to cure alleged deficiencies.

Plaintiffs League of Women Voters of Ohio (LWVO) and Council on American-Islamic Relations-Northern Ohio (CAIR-N.O.) filed a Complaint for Injunctive and Declaratory Relief in the federal court for the Southern District of Ohio on February 13, 2026. The case was assigned to Judge Watson and Magistrate Judge Shimeall.

Defendants filed a Motion to Dismiss on March 19.