A Modest Proposal: We Can Push Back Against Voter Suppression Bills with Races to the Top
What if “horserace politics” for the 2026 midterms meant communities keeping track and competing to get all young people registered to vote?
A supporter in Ohio wrote recently about bills pending in the Ohio state House and Senate that would make it harder to register to vote.
These bills, SB 153 and HB 233, are Ohio state versions of the notorious federal SAVE Act. They prevent voter registration unless a registrant can present a passport or birth certificate or a narrow set of other IDs evidencing citizenship. Tens of millions of US citizens don’t have easy access to such documents. Both the Ohio bills and the federal SAVE Act would disenfranchise these US Citizens in order, they say, to address noncitizen voting.
Non-citizen voting barely exists and is already prohibited. And in addition to stopping US citizens from registering, these bills would effectively obliterate effective registration systems that operate today, like online registration and automatic voter registration, which were not built with a documentary proof of citizenship requirement in mind. Administration of state registration systems would become wildly more expensive and inefficient.
The SAVE Act at the federal level, and the pending bills in Ohio, if passed, would cause serious difficulties for young people who move more frequently than older Americans and have to re-register every time they do.
Ohio could surely use a race to the top because its young people are already being left behind in voter registration. Here’s what youth voter suppression currently looks like in the state in terms of disparities in registration between 18-year-olds and Ohioans ages 45 and above.
In virtually every county, there is a greater than 30 percentage point difference between registration rates for 18-year-olds and those for Ohioans ages 45 and above.
Hamilton County is one of the most populous counties in the state. Here’s what 18-year-old voter registration rates look like on a school-district by school-district basis across the county, compared with registration rates for county residents ages 45 and above. In virtually every district, the disparity is more than 30 percentage points.
If all of the below school districts engaged in healthy competition to improve their rates, it would change Ohio politics as we know it. With more young people registered early, it would mean that politicians and campaigns would be far more likely to keep the needs and concerns of young people in mind as they are campaigning and making policy.
2026 is going to be big in Ohio. There are three competitive congressional districts in the state as well as competitive statewide elections for Senate and Governor, according to Cook Political Report.
Roughly 153,000 young people turn 18 every year in the State. If they were registered at the same rate as those 45 and above, it would mean 62,000 more 18-year-old Ohio voters. If all of them were registered, it would mean 93,000 additional 18-year-old Ohio voters.
Now, I’m not naive. It’s not easy to turn around low youth registration rates, a problem that’s been going on nationally for decades. But it represents an opportunity to strengthen our democracy at a time when we need it most. It’s fundamentally a human problem, and it is one we can fix if we change our outlook and choose to act.
Here are some more ways you can take action:
Sign our email campaign to Stop the federal SAVE Act.
Sign the campaign of the ACLU of Ohio to stop SB 153 and HB 233.
Reach out to students, parents, and educators so that students everywhere will register to vote and get trained to run a drive.