Secretary LaRose criticizes Biden just for naming threats to democracy

Ohio’s Secretary of State Frank LaRose doesn’t think President Biden should talk about the active threats to American democracy, some of which LaRose is complicit in, such as gerrymandering and restricting ballot drop boxes. To the contrary, the President has a constitutional duty to not only name these threats, but to encourage Congress to root them out.

Biden: “voter suppression is un-American”

Biden is condemning attempts to make voting more difficult. He also raised concern that cast votes might not even be counted. That fear is well supported, since most Republicans backed a Texas lawsuit seeking to discard 4 states’ presidential votes, and over a quarter of Congress members tried to discard 2 states’ presidential votes in order to steal Biden’s victory. Some like Rep. Warren Davidson were willing to trash as many as 6 states!

Although they failed to overturn the election, that doesn’t mean the threat is over. Senate candidates Josh Mandel and Jane Timken are still trying to undo the 2020 election 10 months after the fact, tweeting “DECERTIFY THE ELECTION NOW!!!” and “#DecertifyArizona”. Officials across the country who defended the election results are being pushed out and challenged by supporters of the Big Lie. If the 2024 election is close, they may try again and with greater numbers this time.

LaRose, who should apologize?!

Talk about shooting the messenger! LaRose is concerned that speaking the truth about others’ efforts to not count votes will scare voters, but they probably should be concerned about Trump and his allies’ well-documented plot to steal the election in 2020 and in the future! It’s ridiculous to blame Biden for degrading trust when he talks about others’ real attempts to undermine election results, such as this:

Trump: “STOP THE COUNT!”

36 hours after polls closed, as votes were still being counted in several states, then-President Trump literally demanded that election officials not count legally cast ballots, exactly the kind of thing Biden is talking about! Trump also asked Georgia to “decertify” their results long after the election was over. Did LaRose ask Trump to apologize for his persistent actions toward stealing the presidency? Nope, LaRose would rather deflect to statements from a failed Democratic candidate from Georgia than to criticize Trump directly.

Constitutional duty

The US Constitution requires that the federal government guarantee citizens a republic, ie. representative democracy, and gives Congress authority to protect voting rights. Therefore, it’s President Biden’s duty to lead our nation to uphold democracy. Democrats’ answer is the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, both of which LaRose opposes, tweeting “We don’t need the federal government micromanaging states — especially our elections.”

Congress should really amend the Electoral Count Act to prevent partisans from unconstitutionally discarding state-certified presidential votes like they tried to do on January 6th, but neither of these bills do that. At the very least, we need federal rules to end gerrymandering: the map-making technique which rigs election outcomes. This practice continues to this day with ever-increasing precision, including here in Ohio despite State Constitutional amendments which promised to stop it.

Gerrymandered district maps

LaRose is a member of the Ohio Redistricting Commission that passed highly gerrymandered legislative maps in September 2021. Republicans brazenly claimed they deserved 81% of the Statehouse districts, to which LaRose rightly said in private, “This rationale is asinine. I should vote no.” However, he ultimately voted to approve the plan after his chief of staff told him, “It will be cited in the court against the GOP. Probably not worth it.”

He later rationalized that all proposals were “less than ideal” and that a no-vote would have been merely “symbolic”, so he sided with his party. However, his equating of the plans rings hollow because Democrats’ proposal was compliant with Article 11 Section 6 of the Ohio Constitution, whereas Republicans adopted unconstitutionally party-favoring maps in violation of this section.

In January 2022, the maps approved by LaRose were ruled unconstitutional by Ohio’s Supreme Court.

Drop Boxes

LaRose says voter suppression is rare, but that depends on what you consider suppression. Voting rights advocates fault him for unnecessarily limiting ballot drop boxes to 1 per county (88 total), especially during the pandemic, which contributed to traffic jams as voters waited in long lines to reach county Board of Elections.

The right number of boxes is a matter of debate, but Franklin and Cuyahoga counties have 100 times the population of the smallest counties, which rightly raises concerns about equal voting access. If 1 drop box per 100 thousand residents seems reasonable, then that would be about 167 drop boxes statewide, and Franklin county should have a dozen more than it did.

A draft bill from April 2021 and HB387 would completely eliminate drop boxes from Ohio. LaRose opposed those bills but supported HB294, the Election Modernization and Security Act, which would codify into law restrictions of one drop box location per county and limit their use to just 10 days. Democrats proposed an alternative with HB209 which would require about 600 drop boxes around the state.

Purging voter registrations

In 2019, Senator Sherrod Brown said purging up to 235,000 Ohio voters “threatens the integrity of our state’s election progress”, and has cosponsored legislation to prevent states from purging voters for failure to vote. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called purges a “voter suppression tactic”, and encouraged voters to check on their registration.

LaRose responded, blaming them both for “scaring voters”, and even turning the accusation back on Mrs. Clinton, blaming her for suppressing the vote with her comments.

LaRose’s false equivalence

This isn’t the first time LaRose criticized Biden for naming Trump’s treachery. In June 2020, Biden accurately predicted that “this president [Trump]’s going to try to steal this election”, but LaRose callled it “irresponsible rhetoric” that damages trust in elections. If Trump’s rhetoric was irresponsible, isn’t it correct for other candidates to condemn it?

LaRose falsely equated Trump’s anti-democracy rhetoric with Biden’s justified concerns about it, saying “President Trump & Vice President Biden have both questioned the integrity of our elections recently without citing evidence, and they both need to stop it.” To the contrary, there was plenty of evidence that Trump did not respect election results in 2012, 2016, and 2018, and that Trump would refuse to concede defeat in 2020.

Biden needs to be more specific

On 1/19/22, Biden was asked if election results would be fair and legitimate without new federal voting rights protections, and he responded that “it all depends on whether or not we’re able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to try to alter the outcome of the election.”

When asked more pointedly about legitimacy, he replied, “I think it could easily be illegitimate. Imagine if, in fact, Trump had succeeded in convincing Pence to not count the votes.” Redirected specifically to the 2022 elections, Biden answered, “the increase and the prospect of being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed.”

LaRose called his responses “wrong and dangerous”, although the video he shared cuts off the part where Biden talks about Trump and Pence stealing the 2020 election.

The President’s responses are overly broad here, which does run the risk of lowering confidence in election results even further, even when elections are properly conducted. We must demand that these discussions be more specific, to restore and maintain faith in democracy where it’s properly upheld, even as we ward off real efforts to subvert democracy and debate tweaks to improve voter access and security. We must acknowledge that upcoming elections will most likely be legitimate and properly counted even if the Freedom to Vote Act is not passed.

That said, Biden is not being unreasonable to ask: if Trump loyalists are willing to subvert the 2020 presidency, what other elections are they willing to subvert? If they’re willing to lie about widespread fraud, would they not use that same lie to justify trying to overturn a 2022 congressional or state legislative race too?

Biden has offered some more specifics in previous speeches, such as on 7/13/21:

“It’s about moving from independent election administrators who work for the people to polarized state legislatures and partisan actors who work for political parties. … They want the ability to reject the final count and ignore the will of the people if their preferred candidate loses.”

Politifact’s fact check of that speech describes a bill proposed in Arizona to let lawmakers overturn its certified election results, and new laws passed in Kansas and Arkansas that might be exploitable to the same effect. They also cite efforts by lawmakers in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to overturn the 2020 election results. Since then, we’ve also learned more details about illegitimate electoral certificates for Trump in 7 states where Biden won.

Here in Ohio, 42% of state representatives supported a 2020 lawsuit seeking to overturn that election as well. In October 2021, State Rep Jennifer Gross even joined lawmakers from 38 states seeking to unconstitutionally “decertify” President Biden.

All of these efforts are in line with Biden’s raised concerns about state partisans attempting to subvert election results in 2020 and beyond. LaRose is wrong to suggest that these issues shouldn’t even be questioned. However, Biden needs to better differentiate voter access concerns from election subversion, and be more specific with the serious allegations of attempts to subvert people’s votes.

LaRose defends election integrity

LaRose has not repeated Trump’s Big Lie, but he’s been careful not to ruffle his party’s feathers too much either. To his credit, he acknowledged Biden’s victory in November 2020, and again more recently, admitting that “it’s irresponsible when Republicans say an election was stolen and don’t have evidence”, without blaming Trump directly. LaRose has also said a lot to restore confidence in election results, not only for Trump’s Ohio win, but for other states’ results too.

Meanwhile, Josh Mandel alleges even Ohio’s results were not on the level: seeking Trump’s favor by suggesting that he won Ohio by even larger margins than reported. Did LaRose ask Mandel to apologize for degrading trust in democracy right here in Ohio? Nope, LaRose declines to condemn his rhetoric directly.

If Mandel loses in 2022 and alleges the election was stolen from him, will LaRose firmly and unequivocally confront that lie, or will he kowtow to his party with tepid both-sides comments as Mandel runs all over cable news debasing faith in democracy?

Moment of hypocrisy

On 2/1/22, The Hill reported that LaRose found 27 potentially illegal votes in Ohio’s 2020 presidential election, about 0.0005% potential fraud. He took issue with calling voter fraud “rare”, as well as the statement, “Trump and some Republican candidates have clung to lies about the results of the last election”, in this Twitter thread:

LaRose says the characterization of voter fraud being “rare” was “WRONG!”, that this was “ONLY THE BEGINNING” of “MANY investigations”. These foreboding tweets imply voter fraud in Ohio might actually be common, prior to investigations concluding with evidence of that. That seems just like the kind of alarmist rhetoric that LaRose has admonished for scaring voters and undermining confidence in elections.

He “calls out any attempt to downplay this threat” of voter fraud, even though he himself has given assurances that “voter fraud is rare in Ohio”, including the 0.0005% figure:

On the other hand, LaRose downplays the threat of election subversion raised by Biden, even as Trump sends out a press release admitting he wanted Mike Pence to “have overturned the election” and recorded of video saying the “vote-counter is more important than the candidate.”

LaRose then says, “President Trump is right to say voter fraud is a serious problem.” But Trump didn’t just say it was an issue to take seriously; he repeatedly lied about widespread fraud to try to steal the 2020 election. Just before saying “Trump is right”, LaRose mentions “an even bigger problem in other states”, which looks like a nod to Trump’s lies about winning states that went for Biden. Giving Trump any credibility in the realm of election integrity is truly disgusting.

Of course we must take voter fraud seriously, even if it’s a very small number, and LaRose is right to investigate and refer these cases for prosecution. We must also be crystal clear when the amount of voter fraud is too small to change the outcome of an election, and not give any breathing room for Trump’s lies and attempts to defraud American voters. LaRose’s hypocritical rhetoric fails in that regard, and shows he’s playing a partisan game rather than standing strong against threats to democracy from within his own party.

LaRose supports impeaching judge for ruling he doesn’t like

LaRose said that impeaching O’Connor “may be the right thing to do”, that he’d “be fine with it if they did” and “certainly wouldn’t oppose it”. He accuses her of having “violated her oath of office by making up what she wants the law to say instead of interpreting what it actually says”. Many feel that LaRose and other commissioners have violated their oath of office, and the courts exist to settle such disputes. Using impeachment to force Republicans lawmakers’ opinions anyway is an attack on the judiciary.

Touting Trump’s endorsement

LaRose boasts of receiving Trump’s endorsement in a tweet declaring Ohio the “leader for election integrity”. Giving Trump credit for knowing what’s best for election integrity is like giving an arsonist credit for fire safety. It reflects badly on LaRose’s character after everything Trump did to undermine elections.

Insinuating that our elections lack integrity if unnamed Democrats get elected sounds a lot like scaring voters and fear mongering for political gain, the kind of rhetoric LaRose once admonished. There’s little difference in form between Hillary Clinton saying Republicans suppress votes and LaRose saying Democrats reduce election integrity, except Clinton was talking specifically about purges whereas LaRose’s comment isn’t specific about any particular policy.

LaRose lies about Women’s Health Protection Act

Senator Sherrod Brown voted for the Women’s Health Protection Act, and LaRose criticized that vote by lying about what’s in the bill. It would protect abortion rights until the point of “fetal viability” (around 24 weeks when a baby could survive in a hospital) or if the mother’s life or health is in danger, rights that Supreme Court precedent has already been defending for nearly 50 years. It includes additional protections as well.

Whether or not you support the bill or abortion rights generally, the point here is that LaRose lied about this bill, saying it would “ban every single protection of the unborn until the final second before birth”. In reality, the WHPA would allow states to ban healthy women from getting abortions throughout the third trimester and even earlier.

43 states ban late-term abortions right now, and they could continue to do so even if this bill is passed. That’s a far cry from LaRose’s claim that it would remove “every single protection”, even at the very end of pregnancy. Many other elected Republicans have also pushed this misrepresentation, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Going after Sherrod Brown may be a sign of LaRose’s intention to run a US Senate campaign in the future. What else is he willing to lie about to gain power?

LaRose illegally blocked opposing candidates’ ballot access

Ohio Supreme Court ruled that Frank LaRose “acted in clear disregard” of the law to keep two candidates off the November 2022 ballot: one opponent for his own office, Terpsehore Maras, and the other a legislative candidate from the opposing party, Tanya Conrath.

Making citizen initiatives harder

In 2022, LaRose and Rep. Brian Stewart led a proposal to make it harder for citizens to amend the state constitution, while letting legislature-initiated amendments pass under the old lower threshold. This would weaken a century-old check on lawmakers, giving them more leeway to rule contrary to the will of the majority of Ohioans. LaRose unconstitutionally gerrymandered districts to protect his party’s supermajority, and this change would make it harder to strengthen the anti-gerrymandering rules.

He cites the bipartisan Ohio Constitutional Modernization Commission’s recommendation to raise the threshold, but they concluded that LaRose’s bar was too high. According to their report, “members had a gut feeling 60 percent would be too far. …the consensus was that 55 percent seemed like it was more difficult but not too difficult.”

The resolution was later changed to raise the bar for legislative-initiated amendments as well, but the fact that this wasn’t in the first draft speaks to their motivation of primarily wanting to weaken the power of citizens.

In 2023, citizens are collecting signatures for a “Reproductive Decisions” amendment to go on the November ballot. LaRose is so intent on stopping the majority’s voice that he’s willing to bring back a $20 million, low-turnout August special election to raise the bar before November, even though he vocally supported the elimination of August elections just months ago. (We only had a wasteful August election in 2022 because LaRose refused to produce constitutional maps while on the Ohio Redistricting Commission.)

Rep. Stewart originally said raising the bar wasn’t about abortion or gerrymandering, calling that “conspiracy theory”, but later admitted it was precisely about those two issues. Meanwhile, LaRose and others have portrayed majority rule by Ohioans as “out-of-state special interest”, even though his own efforts are bankrolled by the out-of-state billionaire Richard Uihlein, who also funded Trump’s January 6th rally and other election deniers.

LaRose won’t comment on election-denying financier of constitutional effort

The resolution to raise the threshold would also require signatures from all 88 counties to even get on the ballot instead of just 44. Currently, the percentage of signature-gathering counties matches the percentage of the vote to pass at 50%, so maybe there’s some sense in raising the signature counties to 60% if the vote goes to 60%, but instead they pushed the counties to 100%. A county like Vinton could have outsized power to block popular issues from appearing on the ballot, despite having only 3,971 voters in 2022, with 78% voting Republican, far from the statewide Republican affiliation of 53%.

Former Governors from both parties, and other bipartisan officials, oppose the change.

Sherrod Brown reacts

When the legislature passed the 60% proposal, Senator Sherrod Brown criticized it for “mak[ing] it harder for Ohioans to have a voice on the issues that affect their lives”, calling it a “clear power grab”. LaRose shot back, calling his potential Senate rival an “election denier” and accusing him of wanting to “deny Ohioans their right to vote”.

First of all, it’s pure nonsense to suggest Sherrod’s tweet seeks to deny voting rights. Ohioans will vote on this proposal, and he said nothing about stopping that. He’s basically just arguing for a no vote, perfectly valid in a democracy, and LaRose is treating that as an attack on voting rights! As the state’s top election official, he really shouldn’t be so flippant in accusing someone of denying voting rights.

LaRose is basically saying, “People will vote on X, so opposing X is a denial of voting rights,” which is completely absurd. For example, it’s OK to reject a “free soda for all” amendment because it’s a bad idea, and no one will lose their voting rights because of it.

Maybe LaRose’s comment would make more sense if his initiative granted voting rights, but in fact it does nearly the opposite: it weakens the voting power of a 59% majority of Ohio voters.

Secondly, LaRose campaigned with election denier JD Vance, saying “Ohio will be well served” by him, so he obviously doesn’t think election denial is all that bad.

Sherrod has indeed called the 2000 presidential and 2018 Georgia gubernatorial elections stolen in one-off comments, but that pales in the comparison to the relentless, full scale campaign of lies to overturn the 2020 election that Trump and his backers waged. LaRose is no doubt afraid to call Trump an election denier directly, or any of the 147 Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election, something that Sherrod Brown has never done. In the 2004 election, Sherrod voted to uphold George Bush’s victory when it was contested.

Sherrod is right: this question comes down to whether you’re on the side of unchecked politicians, or on the side of the people of Ohio.

Closing primaries

Recently there has been interest in making primary elections open and non-partisan, like they’ve done in Alaska, to ensure every voter gets a full voice in our democracy, including independent voters and elections that end up being uncontested in the general. But LaRose wants to go the opposite direction: to require voters to register with a party “far in advance” in order to vote in a primary, excluding more voters from the process compared to what we do now.

The competition

Chelsea Clark ran against LaRose for Secretary of State in the November 8, 2022 election. Clark’s top priorities are protecting voting rights, easier voter registration, and improving cybersecurity.

There was also a primary challenge from John Adams, a former legislator who won’t admit Biden won and considers drop boxes a source of fraud. Adams had a consistently very negative bipartisan rating from 2007-2014, most recently holding the 2nd worst rating in the House with an abysmal -1.59057.

On 5/3/22, LaRose handily defeated Adams in the Republican primary, and on 11/8/22 he won the general.

LaRose running for US Senate

3/4/23: Secretary of State Frank LaRose touts Ohio elections alongside election deniers at CPAC

4/12/23: LaRose met with chief of staff for National Republican Senatorial Committee – Politico

4/28/23: LaRose confirms his intent to run for Senate, depending on funding

References

In-depth: Ohio Secretary of State on redistricting, election security

Once claiming moderation, Ohio secretary of state says Trump has a point about voter fraud