National Voter Registration Day brings Secretary of State and student organizations together

Owen Conn
Wed, 25 Sep 2019 02:36:10 +0000
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Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose stands with USG members and volunteers who helped register voters on the Oval. Credit: Owen Conn | Lantern Reporter

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose set up post on the North Oval Tuesday to encourage students to register to vote — and spent more than an hour helping them do just that.

LaRose, an Ohio State alum, teamed up with Undergraduate Student Government to register voters and encourage Buckeyes to be active participants in the democratic process as part of National Voter Registration Day, which was Tuesday.

LaRose’s Ohio State visit comes amid a strong push for Ohioans to use voteohio.gov to register to vote, check the status of their registration, find polling locations and access information on how to vote in Ohio.

“One of the things that we’ve tried to do in Ohio is to modernize this process [of voting],” LaRose said. “So many of the processes we engage in on a daily basis are online.”

LaRose said more than 8,000 Ohioans registered to vote on voteohio.gov during National Voter Registration Day. USG helped register more than 600 voters in 2018, Julia Dennen, USG vice president, said in a previous interview with The Lantern.

Despite the success of the website, LaRose’s focus while on campus with USG was to get young people to register or update registrations.

“Being a voter as a young person, you have more skin in the game than ever,” LaRose said. “And it’s important to make your voice heard.”

The bipartisan event was cosponsored by College Democrats, College Republicans and OSU Votes — organizations committed to keeping Buckeyes politically active, Jacob Spiegel, deputy director of government relations in USG and third-year public management, leadership and policy, who helped spearhead event planning with LaRose, said.

Spiegel said LaRose was originally slated to participate in an Ohio State event called Government Meets, where local and state officials would come to Ohio State’s campus to talk to students in a smaller setting, but LaRose instead volunteered to come on National Voter Registration Day.

“We reached out to their office,” Spiegel said. “And they reached back out to us and asked about him coming to campus on National Voter Registration Day and going on the Oval and actually registering voters.”