HB233 is one of the bills that Jeff LaRe himself sponsored, submitting it to committee for a vote. Which is to say, without him this bill would not be in the Ohio Statehouse currently to be considered.

So what does it do? The bill’s summary indicates “...require verification of an elector's citizenship before the elector may vote and to modify procedures regarding voter registration, voter roll maintenance, absent voting, and election petitions.”

On page 25, we see one of the big changes:

(EE)(1) "Proof of citizenship" means evidence that an individual is a United States citizen, in the form of one of the following:

You may have heard that the Trump administration wants to set up automatic registration for the Selective Service draft. If they are setting up automatic registration for that, they have to know who is eligible for it. The government already has information on who is a citizen. But when it comes to the ability to vote, one of the fundamental rights that we all have, they want to make it harder than ever.

They want to make it easier to force you to fight their wars, but harder to have a say in those wars or anything else. This is not a government that wants to be held accountable for anything it does. It wants to be able to tell you what to do and to ensure you have no say in anything that it does by making it as hard as possible.

On page 26 we see another example of trying to make it harder, which sounds familiar:

(2) If an individual's current legal name is different from the name on the individual's proof of citizenship, the individual also shall provide proof of the change of name, such as a copy of a marriage license or court order.

Have you changed your name at some point? Lots of people have! Of course this affects women more than men - many women change their name when they get married. If you have, Jeff LaRe thinks you should have to jump through extra hoops just to have the right to vote at all.

This is the same thing the GOP is pushing on a national level as well - if you are a woman, they really don’t want to hear your opinion on anything.

The bill also adds language to make petitions harder: 

"For the purposes of any proceeding related to this petition, I submit to the jurisdiction of the courts of the State of Ohio, the Ohio Secretary of State, and the board of

elections of the county in which I have circulated this petition. I understand that I may be required to testify or to produce evidence in such a proceeding. I agree to receive any service of process at the residence address I have provided."

If you want to get signatures for a petition, to get your voice heard via a candidate, or to get a measure on the ballot to give people a chance to vote on it, they want you to commit to court proceedings. Again, just for trying to participate in the process they have set up. No matter what you want to do, if you want to make your voice heard, they want to intimidate you and make it as hard as possible for you to do that.

On page 36, it adds a series of reasons to throw out entire signature pages, including:

(3) That any one person has signed the part-petition more than once;

If you accidentally sign twice, instead of just not counting one of the signatures, that entire page would now be invalid over a simple mistake! And remember they want to send you to court over this too.

This is only a few things - this is a 200+ page bill, and you can read the text here to see just how many changes they are trying to make just to make it harder for the people of this state to express their fundamental right.

Learn More: The League of Women Voters provided a good summary of issues related to this bill when it was first introduced.