Ohio Sec. of State LaRose has repeatedly abused the power of his office for extreme partisanship – Ohio Capital Journal

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose must think we were all born yesterday. The overtly partisan elections chief removed all doubt with voters this year about his willingness to play dirty in tipping the scales on free and fair elections. Yet he ludicrously sent out a tweet last week to remind Ohioans “that election officials are THE trusted sources for election information.” 

LaRose was plugging an initiative of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) launched ahead of the 2024 election to have voters “always turn to state and local elections officials for reliable, timely information.” (#TrustedInfo2024.) “Get all your trusted information from my office,” LaRose tweeted blithely without any self-awareness of the distrust he has sown in his office with brazen partiality and prejudice.    

Yet there he is, in a group photo with his fellow secretaries of state on the association’s website purporting to be an elections chief people should rely on for the straight scoop “in the age of mis-, dis-, and mal-information campaigns.” LaRose is an imposter in that picture. He dropped any pretense of being an impartial elections chief people could trust in two statewide elections in 2023. He abused the power of his office to promote a one-sided agenda.   

But far from being contrite over the preferential treatment he gave anti-abortion extremists in ballot issues he campaigned for and soundly lost, the unapologetic LaRose is using his unethical conduct as a selling point in his U.S. Senate campaign. At a recent Republican Party candidate forum, according to a cleveland.com report, LaRose tried to ingratiate himself with a questioner by emphasizing his underhandedness in thwarting the abortion rights amendment. 

Wrap your head around his reported admission of election sabotage to score political points. At the event, the top elections official in Ohio — whose primary duty is to impartially administrate above board state elections — confessed to collaborating with three prominent anti-abortion groups to alter the ballot language on the Nov. 7 referendum in order to defeat it. 

Imagine the Republican uproar if a Democratic secretary of state did the same thing with prominent abortion rights groups to skew ballot language in their favor. What LaRose revealed in colluding with anti-Issue 1 lobbyists to massage the text of a ballot initiative to benefit their campaign was public corruption beyond the pale. The Republican officeholder, entrusted with preserving election integrity in Ohio as a neutral arbiter, bragged about accommodating anti-Issue 1 groups with ballot wording “they wanted” and thought “would be helpful to them.” 

Maybe LaRose figured disclosure of his disgraceful scheme to fashion “helpful” ballot language for abortion opponents of Issue 1 would convince skeptics at the recent GOP affair of his good faith efforts to prevent passage of the abortion rights amendment. Maybe the Senate hopeful figured his blatantly biased and misleading summary of the abortion rights initiative, written in sync with the anti-Issue 1 campaign, would boost his anti-abortion bona fides with the audience.

But here on Earth 1, what the state elections chief pulled in his official capacity as chair of the Ohio Ballot Board (that determines what voters see on their ballots before casting them) was an outrageous breach of public trust. LaRose took a side in an election he was overseeing and corruptly manipulated the ballot language on behalf that side to win. That is about as reprehensible as it gets from a secretary of state elected not, as his spokesperson lamely proffered, “to represent the consversative values,” but to equitably serve all Ohio voters. 

LaRose doesn’t seem to care how many ethical lines he crosses to snare a U.S. Senate seat. Under the auspices of a Secretary of State newsletter (paid for by taxpayers) he promoted his candidacy to replace incumbent Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. At a cost of more than $600,000 LaRose surreptitiously transferred his entire department into a building that coincidentally houses his Senate campaign offices — which he conceded using for campaign activities presumably when he’s not masquerading as a nonpartisan referee of state elections.

At this writing, Ohio’s chief elections officer has still not complied with a federal law requiring candidates for U.S. House and Senate to file financial disclosure forms about their income and assets. LaRose is weeks past due on submitting the legally required financial information that might shed light on how a politician who portrays himself as an everyman of modest means could make a $250,000 loan to his campaign.

Yet the secretary of state appears increasingly emboldened to continue flouting the law, pandering to the political extreme and using his politically nonaligned office to side with an exceedingly unhinged and dangerous criminal defendant/ex-president who tried to overturn a democratic election by fraud and force. (Friday, LaRose signed on to a Colorado Supreme Court brief, with two other MAGA-pandering secretaries of state, taking umbrage with a lower court’s ruling that recognized the culpability of the Oval Office insurrectionist).

The same Ohio elections chief who once defended the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and called claims by Trump and Co. about rigged results harmful and unsupported by the evidence, has sold his soul to become a U.S. Senator. Yet ludicrously, LaRose asks us to trust him with the truth about the 2024 elections. We weren’t born yesterday.