Questions raised about election fraud allegations and voting changes proposed by Ohio Secretary of State LaRose

Some say LaRose’s voter fraud allegations and proposed election law changes are part of an effort to suppress the vote, create a feeling of distrust in the election and disenfranchise people who are legitimate voters.

“I would like the secretary of state to focus on inviting voters in and getting ready for election 2024 rather than thinking of additional obstacles or to cause Ohioans to question the integrity of our elections,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a nonpartisan group focused on voting rights and election issues. “He’s feeding into some of the worst myths surrounding our elections.”

LaRose, who took office in 2019, said Ohio voters tell him they want him to “keep it up” and “do more on election integrity.”

“It’s absurd to claim that pursuing election integrity leads to distrust or disenfranchisement,” LaRose said. “Ohio has some of the most expansive voting access in the nation, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have rules to hold it accountable.”

LaRose, a Republican, said Ohio’s bipartisan system of election administration, which involves teams of Republicans and Democrats handling each task at the state’s 88 county boards of election, is the “gold standard of election administration.”

He has long said that Ohio’s elections are well-run and that voter fraud is quite rare in the state. But he’s also repeatedly cast doubt on how other states handled the 2020 election that President Joe Biden won and which former President Donald Trump falsely contends he won.

“In other states, it’s an unknowable thing,” LaRose said in a 2022 interview during a visit to Montgomery County when asked if he thought the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. LaRose made similar remarks during his unsuccessful run in the Republican primary election for U.S. Senate this year.

Multiple investigations, election audits and court rulings nationwide, along with Trump’s then-Attorney General William Barr, found no evidence of widespread fraud or election problems that would have overturned Biden’s win of the popular vote and in the Electoral College in 2020.

Haitian immigrants in Springfield

LaRose also waded into the Haitian immigration issue in Springfield. On Sept. 14 he appeared in the city with Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno at a campaign event where Moreno called for mass deportation of Haitian immigrants in Springfield.

Most of the 12,000 to 15,000 Haitian migrants in Springfield are legally in the U.S. under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) immigration designation, or are applying for TPS or asylum.

“ONLY U.S. citizens can vote in American elections,” LaRose said in an X post announcing he’d joined Moreno at the event. “Here in Ohio we are doing our part to remove noncitizens and ensure Ohio’s voter rolls are clean when we start early voting on October 8th.”

LaRose, the state’s top election official, defended campaigning with Moreno, who faces U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, in the Nov. 5 election.

LaRose said he’s not the first secretary of state to take a position on a candidate on the ballot and the “stakes are too high in our politics these days to stay silent or neutral.”

“We’re elected as partisan officeholders. There’s an “R” or a “D” by our names, which makes our political affiliation very transparent,” LaRose said.

Two days before his appearance with Moreno, LaRose issued a news release saying he’d warned all 88 county boards of election to watch out for unauthorized voter registration applications after the Clark County board received and rejected a single application that had been erroneously translated into Haitian Creole by a government office as part of a larger batch of other documents being translated into the language spoken by Haitian immigrants. Ohio’s authorized voter registration forms can only be written in English or Spanish.

The form received in Springfield had no name on it so the board doesn’t know who turned it in or if they were a citizen, said Jason Baker, director of the Clark County board.

Critics say LaRose feeds into an anti-immigrant narrative that is being pushed by Republican candidates, including Trump, who is again running for president, and U.S. Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, the GOP nominee for vice president.

“There’s two ways to think about it. This is the secretary of state doing his job to improve our elections or this is a secretary of state as a partisan actor who is trying to signal to voters, stir people up, get people mobilized, make people fearful that folks are cheating,” said Lee Hannah, professor of political science at Wright State University.

“Clearly there’s been Republicans who want fewer people to vote and Democrats who don’t,” he said. “What we’ve seen in recent years is we have a large part of the Republican Party that thinks elections are rigged. They are playing to that crowd.”

Trump continues to make baseless claims about Democrats allegedly letting “illegal immigrants” into the U.S. so they can vote. And both Trump and Vance have repeatedly made false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield are eating people’s pets.

In the aftermath of those comments, which both men continue repeating even though they are false, the Springfield Haitian community is left fearful, the city’s schools, government buildings and public health facilities have been deluged with bomb threats, a community festival was canceled because of safety concerns and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine sent 36 Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers to help protect schools.

“I just want to reiterate the amount of danger our citizen and noncitizen communities are facing as a result of this rhetoric,” said Kathleen Kersh, senior attorney and project director at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE) in Dayton. “We had a (legal) clinic in Springfield on (Sept. 12) and the police had to come and show us our escape route if there were an active shooter. People are casing our legal clinics, community centers, and the houses of people providing charity services. This is absurd.”

She said in 11 years of practicing law in immigrant communities in Ohio she’s never met anyone who registered to vote knowing they were not eligible, but she has had a couple of cases where the people were mistakenly registered to vote by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV).

Kersh said LaRose’s repeated allegations of noncitizens registering or voting contributes to “the dehumanizing rhetoric against immigrants that is putting communities like Springfield and now Dayton in danger.”

“Misinformation has real human consequences and I really hope someone doesn’t have to be murdered or injured for Ohio and national leaders to understand that,” Kersh said.

Voter fraud is rare

Voter fraud by American citizens or noncitizens in the U.S. is exceedingly rare, according to studies by groups such as the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, the conservative Heritage Foundation and the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute.

“The Heritage Foundation’s analysis of legal actions regarding election conduct found only 24 instances of noncitizens voting between 2003 and 2023,” according to an article published in March by the Bipartisan Policy Center. “A study conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice analyzing 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election concluded that there were approximately 30 instances of noncitizens casting votes.”

In Ohio an analysis of voter fraud referrals, including of noncitizens voting, in the 2016 election also found voter fraud is rare, said Ellis Jacobs, who as then-senior attorney at ABLE did the study by contacting county prosecutors across the state, which has about 8 million registered voters.

“What I found was that most of them could be explained by misunderstanding or miscommunications. And that only a small handful were people voting that were not allowed to be voting. And only a small group of people wound up being prosecuted,” said Jacobs, an attorney who is now retired from ABLE.

“Ohio has lots of real problems, but this is not one of them. You have to wonder why some elected officials are devoting so much attention to a problem that doesn’t exist,” Jacobs said.

It is illegal in the U.S. for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and the Ohio Constitution prohibits noncitizens from voting in any elections. People must attest that they are citizens when they register but federal law prohibits requiring proof of citizenship for federal elections.

Those who vote illegally in a federal election face a fine and up to a year in prison. Noncitizens who falsely claim to be a U.S. citizen to register or vote can also be deported, lose their legal status or be denied a future immigration status, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank that promotes bipartisan solutions.

In August LaRose announced he’d ordered that 499 noncitizen names be removed from voter registration rolls. He said those people had not responded to notifications that records at the BMV and the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database indicated they were noncitizens.

Also in August LaRose asked Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost to review for potential prosecution 597 noncitizens LaRose alleged were registered to vote in Ohio, including 138 who may have cast a ballot in an Ohio election.

“The secretary of state said he found some people registered to vote that are noncitizens. It’s a very, very small percentage of voters,” Turcer said. “And one of the things we discovered when he first made announcements about this is that some of the folks that were being accused of being noncitizens were newly naturalized. So they are new citizens.”

She said there also can be mistakes in the documentation at government offices, including the BMV, where people can register to vote, or misunderstandings when people are asked if they want to register to vote either at the BMV or when approached in public by people registering voters.

“It could easily be that somebody got confused, especially somebody who doesn’t speak English,” Turcer said. “If someone inadvertently, inappropriately registered to vote that is very different than somebody intentionally casting a ballot.”

Warren County recently received 300 forms returned by people who’d been alerted by LaRose’s office that records showed they were potentially noncitizens registered to voter, said Warren County Board of Elections Director Brian Sleeth.

“Most of these forms stated from the voters that they were naturalized and provided their number,” Sleeth said. “There were a few that indicated they were not citizens and to cancel their registration. None of them voted.”

Charges usually not warranted locally

This news outlet’s survey of area prosecutors and elections officials in Montgomery, Butler, Clark, Greene, and Warren counties found they’d had few or no referrals alleging noncitizens had registered to vote or voted, none of which warranted charges after being investigated. They reported a few referrals of alleged voter fraud involving U.S. citizens over the years.

“We have not found any type of voter fraud in Clark County,” said Baker, adding that there was one noncitizen removed from the rolls who had marked that they were a U.S. citizen on their original registration form but never voted.

Clark County Prosecutor Daniel P. Driscoll did not respond to a request for comment.

Greg Flannagan, spokesman for Montgomery County Prosecutor Mathias H. Heck, Jr., said a review of cases dating back 7 years found one in 2021 of a noncitizen registering to vote, but there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute and the person had not tried to vote. The same went for the few fraud cases involving citizens, he said.

Warren and Butler County prosecutors each recalled one conviction, both involving a citizen voting where they did not live.

“We have had a number of referrals (involving citizens) and we have tracked them down and we found they were justified circumstances that didn’t warrant prosecution,” said Butler County Prosecutor Michael T. Gmoser.

Voter fraud referrals “all get evaluated and a considerable number of them get presented to the grand jury,” said Warren County Prosecutor David Fornshell, who has been in office in 2011 and previously served on the county’s board of elections.

He said sometimes it turns out there was some confusion or another explanation that is “enough to convince the grand jury that there was not malice involved.”

“We have convicted people of voter fraud. Off the top of my head I can’t recall since I’ve been prosecutor of an incident where a noncitizen voter was convicted of voter fraud,” Fornshell said.

Officials in Butler, Montgomery and Warren counties also are examining separate allegations from LaRose regarding names submitted on petitions and voter registrations in 20 counties but local officials had no further comment on those.

Gmoser said LaRose’s announcements of election fraud allegations do serve a purpose even if the allegations don’t turn out to be true because it can deter people who are thinking about trying to violate elections law. And Fornshell said it can help get noncitizens names off the voter rolls, even if there isn’t evidence of they knowingly committed a crime.

On Sept. 12 LaRose announced that prosecutors had not done enough to prosecute individuals he referred to them for allegedly voting multiple times in the same state or two different states, committed election fraud involving deceased individuals, or were noncitizens who registered and/or voted.

He said there had been charges filed in 12 of 633 referrals he’d made since 2019, a number that does not include the 597 referrals he made to Yost in August. LaRose asked Yost to review and possibly prosecute the earlier cases. LaRose’s office did not respond when asked if any of the 12 had been convicted.

Yost’s office told LaRose that it did not have authority to handle the “overwhelming majority” of the re-referrals because they involved alleged voter registration, which must be handled by county prosecutors, but he would look at the ones that alleged actual voting by noncitizens. His office is reviewing the cases to determine that total, said Steve Irwin, spokesman for Yost.

LaRose contends he’s seen “substantive” evidence of wrongdoing in cases he’s referred.

“I’ve heard all the excuses. Someone says the evidence isn’t good enough. Someone else says they don’t have the bandwidth or the legal authority to investigate it. It’s just blame-shifting, and I’m tired of it,” LaRose said.

Charging a case requires probable cause and proving it requires evidence, said Lou Tobin, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association.

“Prosecutors take violations of our election laws very seriously. But our experience with the secretary of state is that the cases he refers to us haven’t been properly investigated by his office, the cases referred often lack the minimal amount of evidence necessary to pursue an indictment let alone to obtain a conviction,” Tobin said. “And many of them just simply don’t warrant prosecution. It’s really that simple.”

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Also today: Ohio BMV’s mistakes led to noncitizens getting registered to vote, officials say

Coming Monday: We look at the possible impact on voters and local boards of election of Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s proposed election law changes.