A complaint filed with the Ohio Secretary of State’s Public Integrity Division accuses Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign for governor of violating state campaign-finance law by reporting more than half a million dollars in credit-card spending as monthly lump sums, without disclosing what the money bought.
The complaint centers on 15 payments the campaign committee — Vivek Ramaswamy and Rob McColley for Ohio — made to American Express between April 11, 2025, and June 2, 2026, totaling $509,473.01. Rather than list each purchase with a vendor, date, purpose and amount, the complaint says, the committee reported each month’s credit-card bill as a single expenditure, naming “American Express” as the payee and describing the purpose only as a credit-card payment.
Ohio law, the complaint argues, requires campaigns to itemize each individual transaction and to keep supporting documentation for credit-card purchases. By reporting only a monthly total, it alleges, the committee filed reports that are neither complete nor accurate.
The complaint was filed by state Sen. Kent Smith, D-Euclid, the Senate’s Democratic whip, who cites more than two decades of filing campaign-finance disclosures himself — through years of elected office and party work — along with his review of the committee’s public filings. Smith is a Democrat and Ramaswamy the Republican nominee for governor, a partisan backdrop the complaint does not obscure. The dollar figures at its center, however, come from the campaign’s own reports and match the totals the Ohio Capital Journal independently tallied.
The underlying spending was first reported in June by the Ohio Capital Journal, which found the campaign had put $509,473 on a credit card — roughly $280,892 of it since April — without disclosing individual transactions. TiffinOhio.net carried that reporting at the time. The complaint now asks the state to act on it.
The spending represents less than 2% of the campaign’s overall expenditures, and the expenses may all be legitimate; reporting them as a single monthly reimbursement simply makes it impossible for the public to see what they were. Phil Richter, who led the now-dissolved Ohio Elections Commission, told the Ohio Capital Journal that the reporting is the kind of issue auditors handle routinely and is “not that out of the ordinary” as long as a campaign eventually supplies documentation, which it has 21 days to do once formally asked.
Other campaign-finance specialists interviewed by the Ohio Capital Journal took a harder view, describing Ohio’s itemization requirement as unambiguous and calling the lump-sum reporting an outlier for its size. They said that even if every dollar was spent legitimately, routing the disclosure through a single credit-card line removes the public’s ability to judge how a candidate is spending campaign money.
The complaint lands in an office with a potential conflict. The Public Integrity Division sits within the office of Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who, according to the Ohio Capital Journal, has endorsed Ramaswamy and is himself on the November ballot, running for state auditor. Campaign-finance oversight was moved under the secretary of state’s office at the start of 2026, after Republican lawmakers eliminated the independent Ohio Elections Commission — a change good-government groups warned at the time could open the door to favoritism or selective enforcement.
The complaint cites several provisions of Ohio law, among them the statute governing the contents of campaign-finance reports and a separate provision barring a statewide candidate’s committee from filing an incomplete or inaccurate statement. It also points to a secretary of state rule and to the state campaign-finance handbook, which instructs committees that pay a credit-card company directly to list each purchase separately — with the vendor, address, date and amount — and to attach the card statement.
Ramaswamy has itemized this kind of spending before. During his 2024 presidential campaign, the Ohio Capital Journal reported, his committee disclosed individual credit-card purchases; in Ohio, it has reported only monthly totals. The committee’s treasurer, Kevin Broghamer, is an experienced compliance professional whose firm has counted U.S. Sen. Jon Husted and the Ohio Republican Party among its clients, according to that reporting.
Neither Ramaswamy nor the campaign has publicly addressed the reporting. The campaign did not respond to repeated inquiries from the Ohio Capital Journal, and a campaign press secretary who said the office would look into the matter did not provide documentation by that outlet’s deadline.
No ruling has been issued on the complaint. The secretary of state’s office had not produced the underlying credit-card documentation in response to earlier public-records requests and, as of the Ohio Capital Journal’s late-June reporting, had not said whether it had opened any review. Ohio’s next statewide campaign-finance reports are not due until October — weeks before the November 3 general election, in which Ramaswamy faces Democrat Amy Acton.
