When Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose moved to prosecute voter fraud last week, he once again demonstrated that voter fraud in the Buckeye State is vanishingly sporadic – out of hundreds of case recommendations, few indictments have been issued, representing a miniature percentage of the millions of votes cast in the last Ohio election – called it a “false narrative” on social media.
He’s used this accusation before. In February 2022, The Hill news organization published an article that accurately describes the discovery of LaRose’s office possible cases of electoral fraud in 0.0005% of votes cast in Election 2020. LaRose, on the social networking site that was then called Twitter, accused the media of spreading a false narrative and supported former President Donald Trump’s lies about this election: “They’re doing it again” LaRose wrote on Twitter. “The mainstream media is trying to minimize voter fraud to fit their narrative.”
In another tweetLaRose added, “President Trump rightly says voter fraud is a serious problem. More coming soon.”
Trump’s claims of voter fraud were rejected by 60 courtsFox News had to pay $787 million false stories about voter fraud and Trump incited a mob to attack Congress on January 6, 2021 due to false claims of rigged elections.
However, true to his word, LaRose continues to beat the drum of voter fraud.
“It is obvious to anyone paying attention that the integrity of Ohio’s elections is at risk!” He published in October Friday as he continues to demand citizenship documents from the federal government.
However, over the past six years, LaRose has failed to prove that there is significant voter fraud in Ohio.
He was frustrated that district attorneys weren’t doing more to implement what his office thought power be cases of financial fraud, LaRose mentioned in September over 600 to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost. He transferred the case after local prosecutors took up just 12 of the 633 cases he referred to them.
On Tuesday, Yost announced the result: Only six indictments after a Lorain County grand jury declined to indict an Oberlin College student. And one of the accused it turned out that he was dead.
The indictment concerns voting in elections from 2008. Since then, more than 22 million Ohioans have voted in the presidential contests alone, so the 18 allegations of voter fraud show that despite LaRose’s aggressive investigation, fraudulent voting is not very common.
In announcing the charges, Yost said voter fraud is sporadic and so is he he took LaRose to task on the quality of some of his orders.
“I need to have a meeting with the Secretary of State about the value of the issues that haven’t had a vote. I think we should focus on voting,” Yost said.
But that didn’t stop LaRose from claiming that there is indeed a lot of voter fraud going on in Ohio.
“Also look for this false narrative: ‘It’s only six out of millions! Voter fraud does not exist!” – LaRose said last Tuesday on the social media site now called X. “This is a false tactic by left-wing operatives and their media allies who either want to ignore clear cases of fraud or even want to make it easier to cheat.”
The Secretary of State did not respond to a question about how this could be a “false narrative” when it is true that Yost’s work resulted in only six indictments out of tens of millions of votes cast.
Meanwhile, LaRose and his Republican allies in Capital Square have used the specter of widespread voter fraud to adopt a series of measures that critics say disenfranchises people who tend to vote Democratic:
- The voter ID law introduced last year and, according to estimates, is now in effect blocked over 8,000 people from voting.
- Hard restrictions in boxes where voters can place postal ballots. LaRose has already restricted the number of such boxes to one per county – whether or not that happened million inhabitants and tends to vote blue or only 13,000 and tends to vote red.
- Despite the extreme rarity of voter fraud, LaRose wants it too require proof of citizenship so that people can register. Now he has been sued over these activities. As with voter ID requirements, citizens without such documents typically fall into groups such as people of color who tend to vote for LaRose’s political opponents.
- LaRose also removed hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls, many of them because they did not consistently cast ballots. Critics say there is no constitutional requirement that voters must be consistent to be eligible.
In addition to his claims of voter fraud, LaRose has done and said a number of other misleading things regarding elections and voting in Ohio.
For example, last year, while leading an effort to make it much more hard for voters to initiate amendments to the state constitution, LaRose argued that the effort had nothing to do with blocking the abortion rights amendment that passed by November 14 last year, or -gerrymandering amendment that will be voted on next week. But then he told a group of Seneca County Republicans that it was an effort “100% in favor” of blocking the amendment to the abortion law.
As Secretary of State, LaRose heads the Ohio Elections Commission. The entity wrote a voting summary this year for an anti-gerrymander amendment that will be on next week’s ballot that critics say is highly misleading.
Although the Ohio Legislature and Congressional delegation belong to the most gerrymanderingLaRose’s vote summary stated that the proposed reforms would “create a new taxpayer-funded commission of nominees required for gerrymander state legislative and congressional district boundaries to favor Ohio’s two largest political parties.”
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