Under pressure from the Trump Administration, Ohio Senate Republicans have voted to change Ohio law so that ballots that are mailed before Election Day but arrive after the election would no longer count.
Senate Bill 293 would require all mail ballots, officially called absentee ballots, to arrive by 7:30 p.m. Election Day in order to be counted. Currently, these ballots are counted if they arrive within four days after Election Day, as long as they have a pre-Election Day postmark.
Senate Republicans approved the bill Wednesday afternoon in a party-line vote with minority Democrats voting “no.” The bill now needs approval from the Ohio House and review by Gov. Mike DeWine in order to become law.
The U.S. Justice Department has threatened to sue Ohio unless it changed its law to eliminate the grace period for late-arriving ballots, according to Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who’s the state’s top elections official.
Sen. Kristina Roegner, a Hudson Republican who chairs a committee that gave preliminary approval to SB293 Wednesday morning, said the Trump administration’s threats played a role in the bill moving forward
“We also think it’s the right thing to do,” Roegner said.
Republican lawmakers last trimmed the grace period for late-arriving mail ballots from 10 days after Election Day to four days in 2022.
Thousands of Ohio ballots arrive late each election
Ohio has counted late-arriving mail ballots since the mid-2000s, when officials first broadly expanded early voting. It has since become common for thousands of mail ballots to arrive late and still be counted.
For instance, 9,523 out of the 1 million mail-in ballots that were counted for the November 2024 presidential election arrived post-Election Day, according to state election data.
These late-arriving ballots can decide close races. While Ohio has no recent high-profile examples, a well-known case is the 2020 presidential election, which Donald Trump lost.
Trump since has said repeatedly that the 2020 election was marred by widespread fraud, a claim that’s been rejected as false or unsupported by numerous courts and some top officials within Trump’s 2020 campaign and government.
Shortly after becoming president again in January, Trump issued an executive order threatening states like Ohio that accept late-arriving absentee ballots with lawsuits and a loss of federal funding.
Ohio got a follow-up letter from the U.S. Justice Department on Sept. 27, LaRose said last week during a legislative hearing. During the hearing, LaRose said the letter from Harmeet Dillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, “implores Ohio to take immediate action to comply with federal law and avoid costly litigation in federal court.”
LaRose, who’s previously defended Ohio’s early-voting system, described SB293 as avoiding a costly legal battle and making Ohio more similar to other states.
“I believe law should be decided at the Statehouse, not the courthouse,” LaRose said.
Why proponents say the hard cutoff date is needed; others argue move meant to disenfranchise voters
Proponents for the law change say protracted elections are confusing and sow distrust in the results.
“Espececially the litigation they’ve had over late-arriving mail ballots, it’s endless and long and frankly baffling to most people,” Chad Ennis with the Honest Elections Project, a group that advocates for greater elections restrictions, said during testimony last week. “And I would hate to see that come to Ohio.”
But voting-rights advocates say the hard cutoff would disenfranchise thousands of voters, especially given how the U.S. mail sometimes sees long delays.
Jen Miller, president of the Ohio League of Women Voters, said during a legislative hearing on Wednesday that often it’s older Ohioans who end up voting early.
“Four more days to allow ballots that were mailed before Election Day harms no one,” Miller said. “There’s no additional fraud. There’s no evidence of such things.”
Some Democratic-controlled states are fighting Trump’s new executive order in court, according to legislative researchers. A federal judge has at least temporarily blocked the order from taking effect in California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey and New York after those states sued the federal government.
But another federal court has ruled that Mississippi can’t accept late-arriving ballots in federal elections. That order only applies in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.
Miller said the League of Women Voters, which regularly sues Ohio over elections restrictions, may end up challenging SB293 in court if it makes it into law.
“This issue is not settled law,” Miller said.
More new restrictions on early voting could be coming
The Ohio Senate also is considering another bill that would introduce a new major restriction of early voting. It arrives in Senate Bill 153, which received its fifth committee hearing on Wednesday.
SB153 would ban the ballot drop boxes that currently are at every county board of election. Ohio elections officials accepted 181,726 ballots dropped off in drop boxes during the November 2024 election.
The bill also would require all voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and for elections officials to verify their citizenship status before counting that voter’s ballot.
Currently, Ohioans only have to attest on their voter registration form that they’re a U.S. citizen, under penalty of potential felony charges.
