New legislation has been approved by House lawmakers concerning voting rights, but there are concerns from Republicans.
The bill named US HR4 would make it more difficult for states to restrict future voting access. The bill comes at a time where certain state legislatures have added a wave of new restrictive election laws.
Frank LaRose, the Ohio secretary of state, says that the federal government should leave voting laws up to each individual state to decide. The bill was also passed in the house with no republican votes in support, which is also an issue according to Larose.
“What we don’t need is people in Washington D.C. micromanaging the way Ohio runs elections and that’s exactly what bills like H.R. 1 and now H. R. 4 have done," says LaRose. "My hope is that we can defeat this in the U.S. Senate. It passed the House on a party-line vote. I would argue that when you make changes to elections, it should happen with a bipartisan agreement, not through a strict party-line vote.”
As for Ohio, LaRose says we are the gold standard when it comes to running elections and voter access.
