Frank LaRose

Secretary of State Frank LaRose gives info of 8 million Ohio voters to Trump Justice Department

If you are one of Ohio’s nearly 8 million registered voters, your personally identifiable information like full name, address, date of birth, driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers may be compromised thanks to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. He quietly shared the state’s complete voter registration list, with significant private data about each Ohioan in the file, to Trump’s Department of Justice last month without any certainty about how it will be used, shared, or protected. And without any consent from voters. The DOJ, operating at the behest of one man, has demanded access to confidential voter rolls in every state. Justice department officials say they have a statutory mandate to enforce federal voting laws — which is different than building a national database of every voter in the country for who knows what — something the federal government has never done before and lacks congressional authority to do. Still, DOJ leaders trying to seize unredacted voter rolls in an unprecedented power grab over state sovereignty have the gall to insist that the president’s top priority is to ensure the voting public’s confidence in election integrity. We are talking about the same convicted felon who conspired to overturn a free and fair election in 2020 and incited a violent insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, right? The same guy who just declared the need to “nationalize” elections and urged the GOP to seize control of voting procedures in swing states such as Michigan, North Carolina and Arizona? The attempted coup plotter who ordered FBI raids to confiscate state election ballots in Georgia to reseed invented conspiracies about a stolen election he lost? Alarmed yet? The justice department has pressured states to agree to a “confidential memorandum of understanding” and hand over their full voter files without redactions — or be sued. LaRose capitulated on Feb. 13. He sent an electronic copy of statewide voter data, including personal, sensitive information, to Trump’s DOJ “for purposes of enforcing” federal regulations with the “understanding that the Department of Justice will use the records only for legitimate governmental purposes and will not disclose any of the provided records to any entity except as authorized” — and that all federal data-privacy laws will be strictly followed. But the DOJ agreement that compelled at least 12 states to release privileged information about their unsuspecting voters reveals plans to interfere with states’ authority to run elections and how dangerously insecure the sensitive data will be in the department’s hands. The Trump regime has already asserted DOJ is sharing the voter registration data it collects with the Department of Homeland Security. Most states have refused to turn over private voter registration databases to the DOJ and instead provided only publicly available voter information which omits driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers. DOJ has sued over two dozen states to force compliance, but many have argued (successfully) that their obligations under federal law do not require the full, uncensored disclosure of sensitive voter information. As Utah’s Republican chief election official put it, “Neither state nor federal law entitles the Department of Justice to collect private information on law-abiding American citizens.” West Virginia, which supported Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, (like Ohio) was adamant that “the federal government is not going to get any personal information on West Virginia voters.” Kentucky also gave Trump its support in those elections, but Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams said he would not give “Kentuckians’ personal data to the federal bureaucracy unless a court orders me to.” And therein lies the rub. The DOJ’s aggressive scheme to commandeer the complete voter rolls of states has been rejected by multiple courts who find zero legal justification for the department’s claimed entitlement. Three federal courts in 2026 ruled that the Department of Justice had no right to unredacted copies of state voter registration lists. One judge called the DOJ’s lawsuit for private voter roll data not just an overreach into state-run elections, but a threat to American democracy. “The centralization of this information by the federal government would have a chilling effect on voter registration which would inevitably lead to decreasing voter turnout as voters fear that their information is being used for some inappropriate or unlawful purpose.” Another federal judge, appointed by Trump, echoed that sentiment when he dismissed the DOJ’s attempt to obtain Michigan’s full voter registration list. He reiterated the absence of any full disclosure requirements in federal statutes cited by the department — the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 — and said interpreting those laws to require such disclosure would “contradict” their objective to increase voter participation “because the risk of having one’s personal information misused will deter people from registering to vote.” Yet another judge ruled that the DOJ can “no longer” be trusted to be acting in good faith. But in a recent interview, LaRose essentially accepted the DOJ’s refuted claims at face value. He was confident the federal government would follow data privacy laws — despite a massive Social Security Administration data breach last year. “It’s clear the DOJ knows how to handle sensitive information,” said LaRose glibly in the wake of its major privacy failures with the Epstein files. If you’re one of Ohio’s nearly 8 million registered voters whose personal records are now property of Trump’s duplicitous Justice Department, are you reassured? This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.

LaRose shares ‘exclusive announcement’ on election integrity with anti-abortion group

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has provided an announcement on election integrity “exclusively” to anti-abortion Ohio Right to Life, the group said in a Monday press release. It contains a link to a YouTube video in which LaRose talks about how Ohio elections are safe because the nuts and bolts of the process are overseen at the local level by officials from both parties. Last year, LaRose consulted with Ohio Right to Life and other anti-abortion groups as he and his office worked on ballot language for an abortion-rights amendment they all vehemently opposed. LaRose’s office didn’t respond to questions for this story. In the video, the secretary of state repeated his saying that in Ohio, “it’s easy to vote and hard to cheat.” And he lays out several reasons why it’s hard at least for voters themselves to cheat. LaRose explains that county boards of election are each run by two Republicans and two Democrats and that voting machines are “airlocked,” meaning they’re never connected to the internet and thus not vulnerable to hacking. LaRose added that even access to the machines has to be on a bipartisan basis. “The voting machines are under bipartisan surveillance and they’re kept in a storage system with dual locks and keys that require a Republican key to open the door and a Democratic key to make sure that both parties are present,” he said. LaRose later added, “We take election integrity seriously here in Ohio.” By LaRose’s own reckoning, just 0.0005% of the ballots cast in Ohio’s 2020 presidential election were “potentially illegal.” Meanwhile, LaRose has also argued that former President Donald Trump had a legitimate point about voter fraud. As of last year, LaRose had forwarded 521 cases of possible noncitizen voting for prosecution over five years. That resulted in just one prosecution for voter fraud. In addition, in the video he recorded for Right to Life, LaRose said that audits comparing electronic vote results to paper backups have been correct more than 99.9% of the time since he took office at the beginning of 2019. Despite the lack of a statistical case that there’s a problem, LaRose has taken aggressive steps that he says will protect election integrity. For example, he’s purged hundreds of thousands of Ohioans from the registration rolls. Many were eligible voters who were purged for not voting in recent cycles even though critics point out that there’s no constitutional basis to argue that just because a citizen hasn’t voted in some past elections he or she is ineligible. A progressive watchdog group, Dēmos, found that LaRose’s office has some of the worst practices for ensuring that eligible voters aren’t improperly purged from the Ohio rolls. And civil rights advocates say Ohio’s purges disproportionately target voters of color, who tend not to vote for the GOP, LaRose’s party. On the issue of citizen-proposed constitutional amendments, as chair of the Ohio Ballot Board, LaRose has significant control over the description of an amendment that appears on the ballot — in other words, what voters read when they enter the voting booth. He’s under intense fire this year for the language he used to describe the Issue 1 amendment aimed at removing elected officials from the process of drawing maps of Ohio’s legislative and congressional districts in favor of a citizens commission. In 2021 and 2022, LaRose and the other Republicans on the Ohio Redistricting Commission ignored seven bipartisan rulings by the Ohio Supreme Court that said the maps they drew violated earlier anti-gerrymandering amendments that were passed by huge majorities of Ohioans. The proposed amendment that will appear on the November 2024 ballot is meant to be more water-tight than the earlier ones by removing politicians from the process, replacing them with citizens, and retaining a ban on partisan gerrymandering. But LaRose wrote ballot language that opponents say is intended to sway voters against the amendment, which LaRose publicly opposes. Last year, LaRose was similarly accused of manipulating ballot language against Ohio’s reproductive rights amendment when he consulted with Ohio Right to Life and other anti-abortion groups in drafting the ballot language. Nevertheless, Ohio voters passed the reproductive rights amendment by 14 points. Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and X.

Ohio Sec. of State Frank LaRose failing his basic duty of being an impartial election administrator

He’s done it again. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has deliberately sabotaged the ballot language of a citizens’ initiative on redistricting. He wants voters to defeat it in November so he’s manipulating the wording on the ballot summary to advance that objective. I don’t know what happened to the state’s election chief. Early on LaRose had a solid reputation as a conscientious statewide official overseeing free, fair and highly accurate elections. For some reason, he threw it all away to become a political hack with zero respect. But I digress. Last August, LaRose deliberately inserted loaded wording into another citizens’ initiative on abortion access. There was no question he wanted voters to defeat it in November 2023. Wrap your head around that; the top elections official in the state surreptitiously trying to influence the outcome of a statewide election issue. LaRose, who was elected to impartially administer state elections, conspired with anti-abortion lobbyists to craft intentionally provocative ballot language on the abortion rights amendment to rig the results. Fortunately, Ohio voters saw through the secretary’s subterfuge. They overwhelmingly passed the abortion rights amendment last year despite the LaRose scheme to sink it with patently prejudicial ballot wording. But far from being humbled by the stinging public rebuke at the polls, the state elections boss topped his dirty dealings on the Ohio Ballot Board with an even more outrageous ploy last week. LaRose injected gobsmacking deceit into ballot language about the redistricting amendment statewide voters will decide this November. He’s trying to skew the outcome of another election! LaRose produced a stunningly deceptive portrayal of the anti-gerrymandering proposal that would prohibit politicians from drawing their own districts to advantage themselves — the way it’s worked against voters for decades. Ohio’s elections leader characterized the referendum on redistricting reform as pro-gerrymandering, anti-voter and partisan. He lied. The amendment to remove politicians from the redistricting process is similar to a Michigan law voters decisively supported in 2018 to curb extreme gerrymandering and draw fairer, nonpartisan districts. Like Michigan’s constitutional amendment, Ohio’s initiative would also establish an independent redistricting commission to replace the current system of entrenched political engineering. The proposed amendment calls for a citizen-led, multi-party panel without political ties. Commission members, selected by retired judges, would be tasked with drawing competitive, nonpartisan congressional and state legislative district maps following strict constitutional rules on proportional fairness and public transparency. It’s worth noting that the whole grassroots effort in Ohio — to mount a transformative change in how we conduct redistricting every ten years — only gained traction after state Republicans repeatedly thumbed their noses at voter-approved constitutional amendments already on the books and drew absurdly contorted districts to favor their party. Citizens were keenly frustrated with Ohio GOP leaders who blithely ignored court orders to obey the state constitution and routinely submitted unconstitutional district maps until they ran out the clock with approaching elections. But LaRose wants voters to forget all that and accept his dishonest take on how much worse gerrymandering will be under a redistricting amendment designed to end it. If LaRose prevails with his warped ballot wording on Issue 1 (the Citizens Not Politicians redistricting amendment) — challenges were immediately filed with the Ohio Supreme Court — he will again attempt to subvert fair play on another statewide issue. The chair of the state ballot board could have accepted a condensed, bullet-point text of the anti-gerrymandering initiative submitted by backers that was easy to follow and less than 200 words. But LaRose chose to put his spin on the redistricting amendment ballot language with a loaded, 900-word “summary” that spans three pages to confuse voters with a deluge of specious screed. He even added gratuitous fear-mongering with phrasing about the referendum repealing “constitutional protections against gerrymandering approved by nearly three-quarters of Ohio electors” in 2015 and 2018. Of course, those are the same constitutional protections LaRose and Republicans thumbed their noses at with seven straight sets of legislative and congressional maps the state supreme court declared unconstitutionally gerrymandered in Republicans’ favor. The secretary of state lied about citizen mapmakers being required to “gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio.” He lied about the amendment’s restrictions on lobbyists and politicians influencing the map-drawing process also limiting citizen’s rights to free speech. And LaRose stooped to a slanted first impression in the title of the Issue 1 referendum to emphasize the proposed 15-member citizen redistricting commission is “not elected by or subject to removal by the voters of the state.” On the Ohio Redistricting Commission, LaRose voted multiple times for unconstitutional, wildly gerrymandered maps that unfairly favored Republican incumbents in legislative and congressional districts. Yet he had the gall to begin the ballot language on the redistricting amendment by noting it would “eliminate the longstanding ability of Ohio citizens to hold their representatives accountable for establishing fair state legislative and congressional districts.” Please. Retired Republican Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Conor, who helped draft the redistricting amendment, was bemused. LaRose’s lack of awareness about an electorate tired of being played for fools by partisan hacks is astounding. “Do the politicians not see how angry voters are when they keep breaking the law to protect their own power?” In LaRose’s case, obviously not. Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and X.