It’s a feature, not a glitch, that elections in this country are very decentralized, and that decentralized nature of elections administration has been a feature since the Founding.
Declare: Polls typically find that Americans trust elections run in their own backyard much more than those in other communities and states. What should the average American who doesn’t live in your backyard . . . know about elections in your state?
Secretary Frank LaRose: I think that phenomenon is somewhat common. Congress as an institution polls low, but people tend to like their congressman or -woman; they wouldn’t have voted for them otherwise. And so it’s that thing about, ‘We’re doing it good here, but somewhere else is bad.’
Do your homework, and look at the way we do it in Ohio. We have an infographic right there on our website, voteohio.gov/secure. That infographic shows a lot of things. Bipartisan administration — it takes a Democrat and a Republican to do anything; even the building is bipartisan. It takes two keys to get into the door — a Democrat lock and a Republican lock. It’s like those old submarine movies, where it takes two keys to launch the torpedo or whatever else. You’ve gotta have both parties there to do anything. Voting machines that are never, ever, ever connected to the internet. Accurate voter rolls, paper trails, post-election audits — I mean, the list goes on and on.
And those are things that, once people educate themselves about the process, they realize that we do a pretty good job of this. I can’t speak for other states, but here’s the challenge that I would give to election integrity enthusiasts out there: Sign up to be a poll worker. Your county, your parish, they’re probably looking for election officials right now. Look them up, call them; it’s a long day, a little bit of training, a long day that you put in. After that, I think you’ll know why we can say with a straight face, very confidently, why we make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.
Declare: Granting that there isn’t a single “American election system” — what is your opinion of American elections, in general?
LaRose: Right, if you’ve seen the way one state runs an election — you’ve seen the way one state runs an election. Every state does it a little bit differently. But of course there are federal standards. The Motor Voter Act, the Voting Rights Act — there’ve been plenty of times when Congress, when the president, have chosen to set national standards, and I just gave two examples of that. In that sense, locally administered elections, with some level of federal standards, is a fine thing.
But it’s also a relationship between the states and the counties. I love serving as Ohio’s chief elections officer, but I don’t personally run elections. It’s done by tens of thousands of really dedicated people throughout our state. So it’s a feature, not a glitch, that elections in this country are very decentralized, and that decentralized nature of elections administration has been a feature since the Founding, and we should stick with that. We should have, yeah, federal standards, but local administration.
Declare: Since the COVID year, congressional Democrats, congressional Republicans, and President Trump have taken turns trying to create election policy. From your perspective — what could the federal government provide that could actually help you do your job?
LaRose: So there are a few things, and again, oftentimes the talk at conferences like this is, ‘We need more funding.’ Listen,, funding is great, but that’s not my focus. Our state and counties, we fund our elections administration. We’re always happy to take federal grants and use them for good purposes, but the things that the federal government can do [are] like helping with voter list maintenance; access to the SAVE database, for example. I had to sue the previous administration to gain access to the SAVE database. We now have that as a result of a consent decree for 20 years. But we’ve worked to make it better — that SAVE database wasn’t ideal initially, it’s now much improved. But for us, it’s just one tool. We also use databases from our state BMV, other sources as well, to maintain the accuracy of our voter rolls. So that’s one thing.
Working to detect cross-state voting, multistate voters — very rare, but it’s a form of voter fraud that occurs, where someone thinks they’re entitled to cast a ballot in two different states. That can be hard to detect unless you have a clearinghouse of data, where you can look at election turnout from both states and then find where there are those matches.
I think that things like photo ID are a commonsense idea that has 70, 75 percent support around the country. Democrats and Republicans recognize that it’s a commonsense thing. Those are things that are worth implementing nationwide, and I would like to see that as a national standard as well.
State of the Secretaries with Frank LaRose
Declare: Polls typically find that Americans trust elections run in their own backyard much more than those in other communities and states. What should the average American who doesn’t live in your backyard . . . know about elections in your state?
Secretary Frank LaRose: I think that phenomenon is somewhat common. Congress as an institution polls low, but people tend to like their congressman or -woman; they wouldn’t have voted for them otherwise. And so it’s that thing about, ‘We’re doing it good here, but somewhere else is bad.’
Do your homework, and look at the way we do it in Ohio. We have an infographic right there on our website, voteohio.gov/secure. That infographic shows a lot of things. Bipartisan administration — it takes a Democrat and a Republican to do anything; even the building is bipartisan. It takes two keys to get into the door — a Democrat lock and a Republican lock. It’s like those old submarine movies, where it takes two keys to launch the torpedo or whatever else. You’ve gotta have both parties there to do anything. Voting machines that are never, ever, ever connected to the internet. Accurate voter rolls, paper trails, post-election audits — I mean, the list goes on and on.
And those are things that, once people educate themselves about the process, they realize that we do a pretty good job of this. I can’t speak for other states, but here’s the challenge that I would give to election integrity enthusiasts out there: Sign up to be a poll worker. Your county, your parish, they’re probably looking for election officials right now. Look them up, call them; it’s a long day, a little bit of training, a long day that you put in. After that, I think you’ll know why we can say with a straight face, very confidently, why we make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.
Declare: Granting that there isn’t a single “American election system” — what is your opinion of American elections, in general?
LaRose: Right, if you’ve seen the way one state runs an election — you’ve seen the way one state runs an election. Every state does it a little bit differently. But of course there are federal standards. The Motor Voter Act, the Voting Rights Act — there’ve been plenty of times when Congress, when the president, have chosen to set national standards, and I just gave two examples of that. In that sense, locally administered elections, with some level of federal standards, is a fine thing.
But it’s also a relationship between the states and the counties. I love serving as Ohio’s chief elections officer, but I don’t personally run elections. It’s done by tens of thousands of really dedicated people throughout our state. So it’s a feature, not a glitch, that elections in this country are very decentralized, and that decentralized nature of elections administration has been a feature since the Founding, and we should stick with that. We should have, yeah, federal standards, but local administration.
Declare: Since the COVID year, congressional Democrats, congressional Republicans, and President Trump have taken turns trying to create election policy. From your perspective — what could the federal government provide that could actually help you do your job?
LaRose: So there are a few things, and again, oftentimes the talk at conferences like this is, ‘We need more funding.’ Listen,, funding is great, but that’s not my focus. Our state and counties, we fund our elections administration. We’re always happy to take federal grants and use them for good purposes, but the things that the federal government can do [are] like helping with voter list maintenance; access to the SAVE database, for example. I had to sue the previous administration to gain access to the SAVE database. We now have that as a result of a consent decree for 20 years. But we’ve worked to make it better — that SAVE database wasn’t ideal initially, it’s now much improved. But for us, it’s just one tool. We also use databases from our state BMV, other sources as well, to maintain the accuracy of our voter rolls. So that’s one thing.
Working to detect cross-state voting, multistate voters — very rare, but it’s a form of voter fraud that occurs, where someone thinks they’re entitled to cast a ballot in two different states. That can be hard to detect unless you have a clearinghouse of data, where you can look at election turnout from both states and then find where there are those matches.
I think that things like photo ID are a commonsense idea that has 70, 75 percent support around the country. Democrats and Republicans recognize that it’s a commonsense thing. Those are things that are worth implementing nationwide, and I would like to see that as a national standard as well.