BY NICK EVANS
Ohio senators are weighing a measure that would make Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s voter fraud investigations a permanent feature of the office and give the unit tasked with pursuing those crimes a more explicit mandate.
The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, has successfully passed election legislation prioritized by LaRose in the past and is seen as a potential candidate for the office when the secretary’s term ends.
The approach would codify an “election integrity” unit within the secretary’s office handling allegations of voter fraud or suppression — either on its own initiative or after accusations from the public. Under the proposal’s current drafting, investigating allegations, regardless of their merit, would be compulsory.
The office already has subpoena power under current law and the new measure allows the secretary to refer cases to the attorney general if a local prosecutor doesn’t file charges within 12 months. The office would also be charged with producing an annual report detailing the allegations it received and the results of its investigations.
Questions and answers
Before committee members, Gavarone argued it’s necessary to establish LaRose’s election investigation office in law “because that could be eliminated in the future should we not have a secretary of state as dedicated to election security and voter confidence.”
She argued her measure would increase transparency by producing an annual report of the office’s work, and greater accountability by mandating investigation of all accusations that come over the office transom.
Notably, LaRose has made no secret of his voter fraud allegations — regularly announcing the number of registrations he’s flagged for investigation. However, many of the cases LaRose has identified haven’t moved county prosecutors. In many instances, they argue, the facts of the case point to mistakes or misunderstandings.
When the secretary re-referred his cases to Attorney General Dave Yost last year, the AG identified just six cases worth prosecuting out of the more than 600 sent to his office. One of those individuals, it turned out, was dead, and like county prosecutors, Yost indicated questions about whether it was worth his staff’s time to divert resources to clear up clerical problems with voter registration forms.
In committee, state Sen. Willis Blackshear, D-Dayton, pressed Gavarone on costs. How many staffers would the office employ? How large an appropriation would it need in the upcoming budget?
Gavarone had no specific answer to either.
“I can check with Secretary Larose as to how many employees they have right now,” she said, adding that her bill codifies an existing system, and she’d have to “check what the costs were in previous years.”
State Sen. Bill DeMora, D-Columbus, expressed concerns about bogus voter fraud allegations. Leading up to the 2024 election, county boards of elections around the state were swamped with allegations, many of them frivolous, of people illegally registered to vote.
“Are we going to overburden county prosecutor’s office(s) with these malicious and, for the very large majority of the time, false accusations that people are actually committing voting fraud?”
Gavarone pushed back, “the election integrity unit would research the issue, investigate, and determine if it looks like there’s a fraud,” she said.
“If the prosecutor does not prosecute within 12 months, then the Attorney General can come in and prosecute those cases,” she added.
Looking ahead
Under current law, the secretary of state must investigate problems like voter fraud, but county prosecutors are primarily responsible for actually pursuing charges. That disconnect has been the source of friction, with the secretary criticizing prosecutors for declining to pursue cases and prosecutors arguing back that most of the referrals are flimsy.
Lou Tobin, who heads up the Ohio Prosecuting Attorney’s Association, said their view on referrals hasn’t changed.
“What they really are is tips that are passed from the secretary of state’s office to the local prosecutor,” he explained. “And when the prosecutor tries to chase down the tip, they either find that there’s nothing there, or they find that there’s not anything that can be prosecuted.”
Still, he’s actually kind of optimistic about the bill. He argued prosecutors are just as concerned about election security as the secretary — they just need the secretary’s team to do more vetting and investigation on the front end to “improve their work product and to send us better referrals.”
He suggested the Senate bill might be a way to get everyone on the same page.
Speaking after the hearing, Ohio Association of Election Officials Executive Director Aaron Ockerman explained his organization hasn’t taken a position on the measure. If it’s simply codifying the status quo, he explained, county boards will continue operating as they have been.
“It’s really more, you tell us where to send the referrals, and we’ll send them,” he said.
As for those registration challenges that bogged down county boards ahead of last year’s election, he doesn’t think Gavarone’s measure will make an impact.
“All the investigatory work as it relates to a (registration) challenge does fall on the board of elections, because it’s not necessarily fraud,” he said. “It could be a mistake with somebody’s registration, it could be transposed numbers, but then it falls on us to kind of do that research.”
Ockerman did note they’d like for lawmakers to take a second look at Ohio’s challenge statutes.
“Wood County got 17,000 challenges,” he said, “and some of them were, like, a voter registration got flagged in our database because there was an extra space when we got the record from the BMV.”
