Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. (Photo by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal. Only repost photo with the original article.)
Last week, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose sent more than 1,000 cases of alleged voter fraud to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Critics argue, like LaRose himself, that election law enforcement is best done at the state and local levels.
I’m going shopping
Since taking office, LaRose has regularly announced the number of alleged election law violations his office has uncovered.
In almost all cases, these allegations turned out to be unfounded.
For example, after reviewing more than 600 cases, Republican Attorney General Dave Yost brought only six charges.
Yost complained at the time that many of these referrals were for illegal registrations.
“I think we should focus on voting,” he said, rather than setting aside violent crime investigations for record checks.
And Yost’s review amounted to a second opinion.
LaRose has previously referred these cases to district attorneys.
They largely concluded there was insufficient evidence to bring a case.
Ohio Prosecutors Association Executive Director Lou Tobin called LaRose’s actions an attack on prosecutors.
Following the U.S. Justice Department’s referral, LaRose is back to the point, praising the administration “which has expressed an interest in actively reviewing and potentially prosecuting” election crimes.
Yost and Tobin declined to comment on the matter, but the Ohio Senate resolution is instructive.
In the latest budget, Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a provision that would allow the Secretary of State to refer election law cases back to the attorney general if the district attorney doesn’t file charges within a year.
This idea came from Senate Bill 4, which passed the Senate and is currently moving through the Ohio House.
In testimony against the bill, Tobin criticized its codification of “forum shopping.”
In his opinion, if the prosecutor refuses to pursue the case, the case should be closed.
“If a prosecutor decides that a case should not or cannot be prosecuted for any reason, the secretary of state can refer the case to the attorney general and hope for a different outcome,” Tobin wrote.
“This is forum shopping and undermines the integrity and legitimacy of our justice system.”
LaRose’s orders
In press releaseLaRose emphasizes that he has referred “over 1,200 criminal cases” to federal prosecutors.
The secretary did not respond to the Ohio Capital Journal’s request for an interview or comment.
Of LaRose’s reports, approximately 1,000 appear to involve illegal registration cases alone.
LaRose records only 167 examples of alleged foreigners casting ballots in the last eight years of four federal elections.
Ohioans cast nearly 27.5 million ballots in this election.
Even if each of LaRose’s allegations turns out to be true, it would be a percentage of 0.0006%.
LaRose also cites 99 cases of people allegedly voting in two states in the same election, 16 people allegedly voting twice in Ohio, and 14 people allegedly voting after their deaths.
Additionally, LaRose referred to four cases of alleged ballot harvesting and two additional cases of people registering at the wrong place of residence.
“We are working tirelessly to ensure that every eligible voter’s voice is heard,” LaRose said in a news release, “and anyone who tries to game the system will face serious consequences.”
LaRose is not wrong.
In addition to the charges brought by Yost overdue last year, Shaker Heights Trump supporter James Saunders was convicted in 2023 for voting in at least two elections in Ohio and Florida.
LaRose, however, says his referrals “were met with varying degrees of review by Ohio’s 88 district attorneys” and he would like the U.S. Department of Justice to take a second look.
“I am formally submitting for your consideration the materials we have collected and submitted to local and state prosecutors,” he wrote, “and I have attached to the letter documentation and evidentiary materials relating to each of the alleged crimes.”
Red flags
Ohio managed to catch Saunders thanks to a multi-state data-sharing agreement known as ERIC.
Joining several other Republican-led states, LaRose pulled Ohio out of the deal in 2023.
He complained that states should be able to employ the data without having to encourage voter registration, which is a key part of ERIC’s mission.
David Becker helped found ERIC, but now runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
He criticized LaRose for citing years-old evidence that had already been reviewed by state and local prosecutors.
Becker added that in some cases flagged registrations were processed despite the person identifying himself as a foreigner, “which means he is actually a victim and not a criminal.”
“Waiting more than a year,” Becker said, “and publicly presenting this outdated evidence to the Trump Department of Justice immediately before elections are taking place in multiple states certainly raises questions.”
In the past, LaRose has argued that federal officials should stay out of election oversight.
Early in the Biden administration, Democrats proposed sweeping elections and ethics measures that would simplify voter registration, reform redistricting and strengthen campaign finance laws.
LaRose dismissed this idea as “massive takeover of power“
“Elections belong to the people and are regulated by their representatives at the state level” – LaRose said after a confined version of the proposal failed in the U.S. Senate.
“Washington bureaucrats have a long and storied tradition of corrupting our most respected institutions – we won’t let them do it in Ohio’s elections.”
Case Western Reserve University law professor Atiba Ellis believes LaRose is rejecting these federalism arguments now that the political winds have changed.
To Ellis, LaRose appears to be backtracking on the Trump administration’s prioritization of immigration enforcement in hopes of finding a more receptive audience for his claims of voter fraud.
In Ohio especially, there have been political discussions, “some factual, some fanciful,” about the impact of undocumented immigrants on our communities.
“It would certainly give political points to people who believe in that narrative,” Ellis said of LaRose’s orders.
Ellis also pointed out recent court ruling rejecting Trump’s executive order requiring proof of citizenship.
“This court appeared to correctly hold that the basic constitutional structure does not place police elections within the purview of the executive office,” Ellis said.
“It’s questionable,” he said, that LaRose was trying to end the run around elected state and local prosecutors.
“The attempt to make a state issue a federal issue to advance a political agenda should raise concerns about the discretion exercised by the Secretary of State,” Ellis said. “Given that state authorities duly sworn to prosecute these issues have declined to prosecute most of them and appear to have done so on reasonable grounds.”
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