Getty Images file photo of a voter registration form.
The competition for Ohio Secretary of State in November will be fierce, with state Rep. Allison Russo winning the Democratic nomination and Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague winning the Republican nomination on Tuesday.
The Associated Press projected Tuesday night that Russo would win over oncologist Bryan Hambley and that Sprague would beat Marcell Strbich.
Russo has served in the Ohio House since 2019 and led her legislative caucus as Ohio Minority Leader from 2022-2025.
She pointed to her experience as a legislator and her work on the Ohio Redistricting Commission, where she opposed nearly every map approved by the majority-Republican commission.
She voted for the latest Ohio Statehouse district maps, but she and the other Democrat on the committee, Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, said they approved the maps after GOP committee members threatened them with worse maps. They have said they want voters to consider the process, even though a 2024 ballot measure aimed at preventing gerrymandering was rejected.
After going through this process, Russo stated that she was willing to “use the bully pulpit” in the Secretary of State’s Office to make changes and act as a “guardrail” against overreach by the legislature or the president.
Hambley was the underdog candidate for this year’s Democratic Party secretary of state. Hambley, an oncologist at the University of Cincinnati, has never held public office, giving voters a potential tidy slate.
Hambley called Russo to stand down around 8:15 p.m., as the race was being called.
He said he proudly supports Russo as the next secretary of state and her “vision for democracy that gives Ohioans back the power to vote.”
“We lost today because a majority of Ohio Democrats went to the polls and voted for Republican Russo’s vision for our state,” Hambley said. “This is exactly how it should work in a democracy. I hope that everyone in the Democratic ticket, from Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton to Rep. Russo on down, will not leave any community or county in Ohio behind,” Hambley said.
The general theme of the campaign both sides of the aisle supported election integrity, although the means to uphold this principle varied.
On the Republican side, Sprague’s campaign has rolled out ads featuring baby dolls, zombies and aliens in an attempt to highlight his goal of preventing voter fraud at the ballot box in a state the current secretary of state said scams are scarce.
“My north star is to have the most secure election in the state of Ohio,” Sprague told the Capital Journal on Tuesday evening.
While Sprague pushed for the introduction of universal voting machines with a secured paper trail of all votes but defended the state system as powerful, Strbich criticized the system as a whole and called for updated software security systems, pointing to his military security experience as evidence of his qualifications.
Every vote cast in Ohio is already documented by either a paper ballot or a voter-verified paper audit trail.
Toledo resident Tom Pruss ran on the Libertarian ticket and received about 1,000 votes.
Sprague and Russo now begin campaigning for Ohio’s November 3 general election.
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