The Campaign Legal Center, the ACLU Voting Rights Project and the ACLU of Ohio have sued Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose over a new law they say mandates aggressive, monthly purges of the state’s voter rolls using outdated citizenship data, potentially stripping eligible naturalized citizens of their registration in the run-up to the 2026 midterms. The lawsuit, filed February 13 on behalf of CAIR-Northern Ohio and the League of Women Voters of Ohio, targets Senate Bill 293.
What Senate Bill 293 Requires
SB 293 directs Ohio election officials to conduct systematic database checks and cancel the registrations of voters flagged as noncitizens, with those checks required to occur on a monthly basis, including within the 90-day window immediately preceding a federal election. Plaintiffs argue that provision alone puts the law in direct conflict with the National Voter Registration Act, which generally bars states from conducting systematic voter-roll purges in the final 90 days before a federal election precisely to prevent eligible voters from being wrongly removed too close to Election Day to fix the error. The complaint further alleges that SB 293 provides no meaningful cure process for voters who are wrongly flagged, leaving them to discover the cancellation only when they attempt to cast a ballot, at which point provisional voting may be their only recourse.
Why Advocates Say the Data Is Flawed
The complaint alleges SB 293 relies on databases that do not reliably track naturalization, meaning a legal immigrant who became a U.S. citizen years ago could still be flagged as a noncitizen and removed from the rolls without adequate notice or a meaningful chance to correct the record before an election. The groups say this risk falls hardest on naturalized citizens, a population that in Ohio includes tens of thousands of voters across cities such as Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati. The lawsuit followed a formal warning letter the organizations sent LaRose on January 22 outlining the alleged NVRA violations, which they say his office declined to address before the law’s implementation proceeded. The League of Women Voters of Ohio, a nonpartisan organization that has monitored the state’s election administration for decades, said in its filing that it has already fielded calls from naturalized citizens who received cancellation notices despite having voted in multiple previous Ohio elections without incident, evidence the group says demonstrates the database mismatch is not hypothetical.
The State’s Position
LaRose’s office has defended SB 293 as a responsible response to public concern about noncitizen voting, arguing that Ohio has an obligation to keep its voter rolls current and accurate and that the law includes notice procedures for flagged voters. Republican sponsors of the bill in the Ohio legislature have framed monthly reviews as a modernization of list-maintenance practices rather than a partisan tool, saying automated checks reduce the administrative burden on county boards of elections compared with periodic manual audits. LaRose’s office has also emphasized that flagged voters are mailed a notice and given an opportunity to confirm citizenship before removal takes effect, and that Ohio’s 88 county boards of elections retain discretion to pause a cancellation if a voter contacts them with documentation, a safeguard the state argues satisfies federal law even on a monthly cycle.
A Broader Legal Fight
Ohio’s case mirrors a nearly identical dispute unfolding in Texas, where LULAC and Common Cause have sued over the state’s use of a federal immigration database to flag and remove thousands of voters, and echoes concerns civil rights groups have raised about a Department of Justice effort to compile a national voter database using similarly imperfect citizenship records. Voting rights lawyers describe 2026 as a turning point year in which several Republican-controlled legislatures moved in parallel to tighten citizenship verification for voter rolls, prompting a corresponding wave of NVRA litigation from the same network of advocacy groups. Election law analysts say the outcome of the Ohio and Texas cases could set persuasive precedent for one another, since both hinge on the same underlying legal question of whether a state can rely on federal immigration data, rather than its own verified records, to justify removing a registered voter without further process.
What’s Next
The case, captioned League of Women Voters of Ohio v. LaRose, is pending in federal court, with plaintiffs seeking an injunction to halt purges conducted under SB 293 before Ohio’s registration deadline closes ahead of the November midterms. A ruling against the state would likely force Ohio to pause its monthly review cycle and reinstate any voters already removed under the law, while a ruling upholding SB 293 would hand Republican-led states a legal template for similar citizenship-verification statutes already advancing in other legislatures. Either outcome is expected to shape how election officials nationwide balance list-maintenance obligations against the NVRA’s protections for voters in the critical weeks before a federal election.
