The posting of the list of inactive voters earlier this week by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose should be a wake-up call to Lucas County residents who tend to be among the lowest-performing when it comes to voter turnout.
The 352,391 Ohio voters on the list of voters to be purged includes 25,287 persons in Lucas County.
Lucas County appears to have more than its fair share of inactive voters.
As a percentage of the county’s population, Lucas County’s number of inactive voters on the Secretary of State’s list is about 6 percent. That’s a higher percentage than any of the other five large urban counties.
For example, Franklin County has three times as much population as Lucas County, but only 3,217 more inactive voters, or a little more than 2 percent of its population.
Lucas County accounts for 7.81 percent of the inactive voters this year, which is more than Hamilton, Summit, or Montgomery counties, all of which have much more population.
Deputy Director Tim Monaco said there have been years when Lucas County had lower counts of inactive voters.
Voter registration rolls balloon during busy election years, such as 2023 when Lucas County had four elections occur during the removal period. Bad voter registrations can also crop up during voter registration drives when there is a mismatch with Bureau of Motor Vehicles records.
To a large extent, the voter purge list is mostly either voters who have chosen not to participate in voting for at least six years, or they moved and their departure from the Buckeye state has not come to the secretary of state’s attention.
Ohio used to belong to a voluntary national voter registration consortium under which the member states shared each other’s information, allowing for dead or moved voters to be quickly identified and removed from the voter rolls rather than to have to wait six years for them to be purged as inactive voters. Unfortunately, falsehoods spread by right-wing media about the organization put pressure on Mr. LaRose to withdraw from it.
Either way, whether because of apathy or because Lucas County maintains too many defunct voters on our rolls, or a combination of the two, Lucas County tends to show up as having one of the poorest voter turnout rates in the state.
In last year’s presidential election, voter turnout in Lucas County was 63.6 percent, second lowest of the 88 counties. A total of 111,035 supposed registered voters in the Lucas County voter rolls did not cast a ballot.
A cleaner voter list would enhance the county’s turnout appearance and remove clutter from the voter rolls that could create the potential for election fraud.
First Published March 13, 2025, 4:00 a.m.
