Since 2020, Republican lawmakers and Ohio election officials have enacted a series of changes that tightened the state’s voting laws and election procedures. Supporters say the changes improve election security and voter confidence. Critics argue they make voting more difficult, despite studies and election officials finding relatively few cases of voter fraud in Ohio and nationwide.

Here’s a rundown of major changes to voting rules and election administration since 2020: 

August 2020

What happened: Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose directed elections officials around the state to limit the number of absentee ballot drop boxes to one location in each county. Local elections officials contending with the COVID-19 pandemic had requested permission to use multiple boxes in different locations. LaRose was sued, and courts criticized the directive but said it was within his power. In 2023, this administrative rule was written into a bill and voted into law by the Ohio legislature. Gov. Mike DeWine signed it, and it took effect in April 2023. It also added requirements for security and surveillance of the drop boxes, which were allowed to remain open 24 hours a day during early voting.

January 2023 – April 2023

What happened: Ohio lawmakers passed the state’s most significant election-law overhaul in years. House Bill 458, passed on Jan. 6, 2023, went into effect that April requiring photo ID for in-person voting. That meant voters could no longer use utility bills, bank statements or government checks as identification or proof of residency.

The bill also: 

  • Eliminated early voting on the Monday before Election Day.
  • Shortened the deadline for requesting absentee ballots.
  • Shortened the period of time during which absentee-ballot voters could fix errors on their ballots
  • Limited the documents new voters could use when registering to an Ohio driver’s license number, an Ohio state ID number, and the last four digits of a Social Security number. 
  • Limited curbside voting to people with a disability who cannot physically enter a polling place.
  • Made it a crime for someone to possess or return another voter’s absentee ballot unless they are an election official, a mail carrier, or a spouse, parent, stepparent, child, stepchild, sibling, grandparent, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew or in-law of the voter. This portion of the law was later challenged in federal court by an Ohio woman with a disability. In July 2024, a judge ruled that voters with disabilities had the right to have a trusted person of their choice deliver their ballot.

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2024

What happened: Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose ordered voters to only deposit their own ballot in county drop boxes. Family members assisting a relative had to go inside the local board of elections office and complete paperwork or face a possible felony charge.

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November – December 2025

What happened: Ohio lawmakers voted to require that absentee ballots be received by local elections officials before the polls close on Election Day in order to be counted. In the past, the ballots had to be postmarked by Election Day but could be received later. The law, which took effect in March 2026, also created additional steps for elections officials to verify voter registrations, including looking into registration records that don’t match state or federal databases or were flagged for not matching existing voter data. In some instances, voters who are flagged could be asked to vote by provisional ballot and barred from voting by mail. 

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January – June 2026

What happened: Using updated rules, Ohio removed hundreds of thousands of inactive voter registrations. Elections officials deemed this routine maintenance. Voting-rights advocates characterized it as a voter purge that included removing voters who appeared to register in other states. Voting rights groups sued to challenge the removals.

June 2026

What happened: Ohio lawmakers voted to require voters to provide photo ID information when voting by mail beginning in 2027. Voters can provide the identification either when requesting an absentee ballot or when returning it. They can still request an absentee ballot with their driver’s license or Ohio state ID number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. Voters who want to hand-deliver their ballots will be able to show elections officials their photo ID in person. The law also requires the secretary of state, the boards of elections, the Registrar of Motor Vehicles and public libraries to provide free copies of voters’ photo IDs. (Gov. Mike DeWine has until June 24 to sign the bill and has repeatedly declined to comment on it since its passage.)

There are some exceptions to the ID law, including:

  • Uniformed military and overseas voters
  • Voters who who do not have photo ID because they have religious objections to being photographed
  • Voters who don’t have an ID or can’t provide one because of a severe medical condition, severe disability, are in jail for an offense that is not a felony, they are immobile and can’t get a photo ID or have a “material obstacle that makes the elector unable to obtain photo ID or a copy of the elector’s photo ID.” (It’s not clear what this means in the law.)

The law also directs the secretary of state to create a secure online portal for registered voters to request absentee ballots. Currently, voters have to fill out a form online or fill out a form they have printed and mail it or hand deliver it to the board of elections in their county. 

What happened: Lawmakers also voted to place a measure before voters to write Ohio’s photo-ID requirement into the state constitution. The amendment would keep recently-passed ID rules intact. But it also would make room for the lawmakers to
change voting requirements at some point in the future – for instance by adding a signature-matching requirement to mail ballots. 

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This timeline draws on reporting from Signal Ohio’s Andrew Tobias and Signal Cleveland’s Frank W. Lewis and Helen Maynard.

Signal Cleveland is a nonprofit newsroom that fuses community building with local news reporting. We produce authoritative, trustworthy daily journalism across a range of topics, including government, economy, education, health, and safety and resilience.