What we can learn from the Dayton, Ohio incident and why elections must follow the U.S. Constitution

Something fishy brought federal agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to a school in Dayton last week.

They claimed to be investigating allegations of voter fraud, according to Dayton Public Schools superintendent David Lawrence who was told the surprise DHS probe involved a graduate of Ponitz Career Technology High School.

The feds alleged a former student was told who to vote for when filling out a voter registration form at the school.

Lawrence discounted the story, “We don’t have any evidence of that,” and insisted the nonpartisan group that comes to the school every October to help 18-year-olds register to vote does not tell students how they should vote.

DHS agents did not conduct any immigration enforcement at the school and left after about 15 minutes.

Question is, what business does the federal government have snooping around any Ohio high school on dodgy hearsay of voter fraud in a yearly civics program?

DHS portrayed the visit as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

But “wildly out of bounds,” was how Collin Marozzi of ACLU of Ohio described it.

Other voting rights advocates called the DHS appearance at Ponitz “an attempt to intimidate young people, to intimidate the schools, to intimidate volunteers from encouraging people to engage in legal voter registration activities.”

The suspicious timing of the highly unusual DHS trip to Dayton coincided with the recent zeal of Donald Trump and Cabinet flunkeys to seize control of state-run elections, extract sensitive voter data, raid state election warehouses for ballots and do whatever it takes to tip the scales in the upcoming November election.

The Department of Justice demanded voter and election information from Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose last fall with assurances that the personal material on registered voters — full name, date of birth, address, driver’s license numbers, last four digits of social security numbers, etc. — would be safe with the federal government.

Never mind the egregious breaches of personal data at federal agencies under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). 

A statement from LaRose’s office at the time noted that Ohio is “working with our federal partners better than ever before, but we also have a legal obligation to make sure sensitive voter data is protected and secure.”

It also stressed that Ohio’s voter registration database is “extremely transparent” and available on the SoS website.

Interestingly, while Ohio may have been reluctant to fully oblige the DOJ on its voter rolls, it did agree with three other Republican states to help Homeland Security obtain driver’s license records as part of a legal settlement with the federal government over access to its citizenship records.

LaRose will provide DHS with 1,000 randomly selected Ohio driver’s license records later this month — with no certainty about how that data will be used or stored by Trump’s DHS.

So much for Ohioans’ privacy and data security. 

All 50 secretaries of state got another unprecedented ask by federal officials Friday.

They were each summoned by the FBI to a mysterious conference with members of the DOJ, DHS, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and U.S. Election Commission to discuss “preparations” for this year’s midterm elections.

The invite came just days after several secretaries of state, meeting in Washington, D.C., raised alarm about the Trump administration’s increasing efforts to expand federal monitoring of the nation’s election process with a direct focus on certain states.

“We should take over voting, the voting in at least 15 places,” said Trump, singling out Democratic cities with minority-majority populations. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

He falsely claimed states are “agents” for the federal government — the U.S. Constitution gives states primary authority over election administration — and, like pre-2020 election, Trump hedged on accepting the results of the midterms.

“If they’re honest,” he demurred, before preemptively declaring Democrats would cheat.

Truly rich coming from a convicted felon who schemed to overturn an election he lost and incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol as the final act in his multi-part conspiracy.

But Trump is slyly resurrecting the Big Lie he deployed five years ago and seeding baseless distrust in the country’s free, fair, notably secure, and remarkably accurate elections for a reason.

He wants exclusive authority over state elections to do what he could not in 2020 — rig outcomes.

The Constitution gives the president no power over elections, but that will not stop Trump from trying to muck up the midterms through extortion, intimidation, bizarre high school investigations, or even paramilitary posted outside polls.

He cannot abide a check on his lawless regime at the ballot box.

If he loses one or both houses of Congress to the Democrats in 2026, oversight of his unconstrained, unaccountable reign could be relentless. 

So he schemes to undermine state autonomy on running elections, demands state voter rolls be dispatched to the feds, sends the FBI on state ballot raids led (inexplicably) by the director of national intelligence, and endorses an even more restrictive version of a GOP voter suppression bill (SAVE Act) that could block millions of Americans from voting by requiring proof of citizenship at the polls. 

Your right to vote freely and fairly in the looming election and have that vote count without federal interference or subterfuge is very much on the line now.

A power grab underway by the man who would be king seriously threatens to replace self-governance with subjugation.

Support for the U.S. Constitution, separation of powers, checks and balances, and local control over elections in Ohio must be unequivocal and unyielding.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.