citizenship means standing up for everyone s right to vote. last year, part of the vote rights act was weekened, but conservative republicans and liberal democrats are working together to strengthen it. but in ohio, republicans are not working to make the voting rights stronger. they are passing a new bill that will make it harder to vote. it will put limits on the use of absentee ballots and cut early voting by almost a week which will eliminate the ability of voters to both register and vote early on the same day. state senator frank larose who is the sponsor of that bill told the associated press those changes are necessary because same day registration and voting, quote, perpetuates an election system that is susceptible to voter fraud. an investigation of voter fraud by the republican secretary of state found that out of 5.63 million votes cast in the last
susceptible to voter fraud. an investigation of voter fraud by the republican secretary of state found that out of 5.63 million votes cast in the last presidential election, there were 135 possible just possible voter fraud cases referred to law enforcement just for more investigation. that is about 2/100 of 1% of the voters. joining me now are nina turner, ohio state senator and a canada for ohio secretary of state and msnbc s krystal ball. senator turner, so how many convictions do you get in a typical year or in any year in ohio on voter fraud? i m not impressed by this number of, this is how many referrals we made to law enforcement to
into it the ohio state constitution. the right to vote, and who can vote right now, those things can be changed because it s not in the ohio constitution. and so this gives the people a voice. it puts it in the state constitution and then it can be a model around the country. that is what you kicked off today. because one of the things i was checking out, representative reece is that voter fraud in your state s 2012 election was nonexistent. you have 5.63 million votes cast. just 135 possible cases of voter fraud were referred to authorities. that s 0.002%. so all these new voter id laws and all these laws are against something that is not happening in your state. well, absolutely. it s a scare tactic. the real issue is in ohio and in my district.
and they said that wasn t their intention. the goal was just to kind of control the message, because they found that it can get distorted on either side of the and that s a reasonable thing. husted actually acknowledged in his press conference that north pole of these cases of illegal voting would even have been stopped by a voter i.d. law because these people already had driver s licenses. so that is not the takeaway that certainly should be taken from this news. of course republicans in ohio may draw a different lesson, and there s talk that they are looking at introducing a voter i.d. bill. as you said, they will certainly be pushing these other very restrictive voting laws when they come back in january. so just to get this number accurately, 5.63 million people. so 5,630,000 voted in 2012. they found 17 noncitizens out of that number. so as we look at this minuscule number of noncitizen voters in