Nearly 30 noncitizens voted in Ohio
Source: Gannet News Service
COLUMBUS – Two Sandusky County residents who weren't U.S. citizens were registered to vote, although never actually cast a ballot, according to data released Thursday by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted.
Altogether, a recent review of Ohio's voter rolls found 145 noncitizens registered to vote. Of those, 27 cast ballots in an election, although none of them cast the deciding vote in any race.
Registering to vote or casting a ballot before becoming a citizen can result in a fifth-degree felony charge. As recently as Wednesday, a Canadian woman living in Ohio had her citizenship application denied because she registered to vote, Husted said.
Husted's system can identify noncitizens who have registered with their driver's license number by matching it with Bureau of Motor Vehicles' information that indicates whether a person is a citizen.
Read more: http://www.thenews-messenger.com/story/news/local/2015/03/13/nearly-noncitizens-voted-ohio/70260644/
Quite a spin in that headline. The real news:
Ohio’s Huge Voter Fraud Investigation Turns Up Nearly Nothing
Forty-four non-citizens may have voted illegally in Ohio at some point since 2000. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has been on a mission to weed out purported voter fraud in the state since he took office in 2011. After launching an investigation into what he called an “expanding loophole” allowing non-citizens to vote in Ohio and potentially decide elections, he announced Thursday that 145 non-citizens were registered to vote illegally in 2014, amounting to just .0002 percent of the 7.7 million registered voters in the state.
Husted’s office would not provide any information about the 27 people it referred to the Attorney General’s office for further review. But in 2013, his office sent 17 potential cases — .0003 percent of total ballots cast in the state — to the AG who eventually referred them to county prosecutors. Most reports of voting irregularities were dropped by the county prosecutors because the “voter fraud” problems were determined to have been caused by simple mistakes and confused senior citizens, according to a Cleveland Plain Dealer investigation.
Voter fraud in Ohio is a fifth-degree felony and could carry up to a year in prison. But of the cases referred to prosecutors’ offices in 2013, most irregularities were caused by voter confusion or mistakes made by elections officials and not deliberate attempts to commit fraud, the investigation found. For example, Cuyahoga County looked into 15 cases referred from Husted’s office and chose not to pursue criminal charges against any of the individuals, concluding that the voters were confused about the “Golden Week” during which people can both register to vote and also cast their absentee ballot.
In total, only four people were convicted of voting fraud as a result of the 2013 investigation, Eve Mueller, the deputy director of communications for the Office of Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, told ThinkProgress. Mueller said the office could not comment on the ongoing investigations into the newly announced cases.
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/03/13/3633472/husted-noncitizen-voters/
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