LaRose shares ‘exclusive statement’ on election integrity with anti-abortion group

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose issued a statement on election integrity “exclusively” to the anti-abortion Ohio Right to Life group, the group said in a news release Monday. Contains a link to YouTube video in which LaRose talks about how Ohio’s elections are secure because key elements of the process are overseen at the local level by officials from both parties.

Last year, LaRose consulted with Ohio Right to Life and other anti-abortion groups as he and his office worked on ballot language for the abortion rights amendment, which they all staunchly opposed.

LaRose’s office did not respond to questions for this story.

In the recording, the secretary of state repeated his statement that Ohio is “easy to vote and hard to cheat.” He also gives several reasons why it is complex for at least the voters themselves to cheat.

LaRose explains that county boards of elections are run by two Republicans and two Democrats, and the voting machines are “closed,” meaning they are never connected to the Internet and therefore not vulnerable to hacking. LaRose added that even access to machines must be done on a two-way basis.

“The voting machines are under bilateral surveillance and are kept in a warehouse equipped with double locks and keys that require a republican key to open the door and a democratic key to ensure that both parties are present,” he said.

LaRos later added: “Here in Ohio, we take election integrity seriously.”

According to LaRose’s estimates, just 0.0005% of votes cast in Ohio’s 2020 presidential election were “potentially illegal.” Meanwhile, LaRose also argued that former President Donald Trump had legitimate comments about voter fraud.

Until last year, LaRose had referred 521 cases of potential non-citizen voting for impeachment purposes over a five-year period. This resulted in only one voter fraud charge.

Additionally, in a video recorded for Right to Life, LaRose stated that audits comparing electronic voting results to paper backups have been true more than 99.9% of the time since he took office in early 2019.

Despite the lack of statistical evidence of a problem, LaRose has taken aggressive steps that he believes will protect the integrity of the election.

For example, it removed hundreds of thousands of Ohioans from registration rolls. Many of them were eligible voters who were removed for not voting in recent cycles, although critics point out that there is no constitutional basis for saying that just because a citizen did not vote in some previous election, he or she is ineligible.

The progressive watchdog group Dēmos found that LaRose’s office had some of the worst practices in ensuring that eligible voters were not improperly removed from Ohio’s voter rolls. Civil rights advocates say Ohio’s purges disproportionately hit voters of color, who typically don’t vote for the GOP, LaRose’s party.

When it comes to citizen-proposed constitutional amendments, as chairman of the Ohio Board of Elections, LaRose has significant control over the description of the amendment that appears on the ballot — in other words, what voters read when they enter the ballot box.

He came under fire this year for the language he used to describe Amendment 1, which sought to remove elected officials from Ohio’s map-drawing process. legislative and congressional districts for the citizens’ commission.

In 2021 and 2022, LaRose and other Republicans on the Ohio Redistricting Commission ignored seven bipartisan Ohio Supreme Court rulings that found the maps they drew violated previous anti-gerry-gerry amendments adopted by the extensive majority of Ohioans.

The proposed amendment, which will appear on the ballot in November 2024, is intended to be more airtight than the previous ones, by removing politicians from the process and replacing them with citizens, and maintaining the ban on partisan manipulation of land. But LaRose wrote ballot language that opponents say is designed to sway voters against an amendment that LaRose publicly opposes.

Last year, LaRose was similarly accused of manipulating the ballot language against Ohio’s reproductive rights amendment when consulted with Ohio Right to Life and other anti-abortion groups in developing ballot language. Nevertheless, Ohio voters passed the reproductive rights amendment by a 14-point majority.