Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose effectively has blocked an effort by citizens in two rural counties to ban the use of voting machines, ruling the process they tried to use to do so was illegal under state law.
Citizens in Seneca and Monroe counties collected petitions with hundreds of voter signatures in an attempt to ask voters there to repeal their counties’ use of voting machines. They cited a state law that allows voters to approve the use of voting machines in their respective counties.
But LaRose issued a legal memo on Monday saying the law only allows voters to adopt voting machines – not repeal them once they’re already in place.
LaRose’s ruling deflates a statewide effort from activists within the GOP’s right wing who have been arguing the use of voting machines makes Ohio voting vulnerable to fraud. But these activists have provided no evidence to support such claims and election audits show Ohio’s voting system remains highly accurate and secure, according to elections officials.
Monroe and Seneca counties each use voting machines, as do all of Ohio’s other 86 counties. In every county local officials voted to do so. LaRose noted the legislature considered changing state law to allow citizens to schedule a vote to repeal the use of voting machines, but it never advanced the bill. Local prosecutors in both Monroe and Seneca counties agree with LaRose’s ruling.
Following LaRose’s ruling, the bipartisan, four-member boards of election in Monroe and Seneca counties voted to follow LaRose’s advice and reject the citizen petitions.
LaRose said that in his ruling, also referred to as an advisory, he wasn’t weighing in on the substance of the petition drive. In an interview with Signal, LaRose said the law is clear that the citizen groups couldn’t do what they were trying to do.
LaRose also said local officials could vote to abolish voting machines if they so choose, though he said he wouldn’t recommend it. He said hand-counting ballots would be less accurate than machine counting and more time consuming.
“I have found the process we’ve adopted yields a faster and more accurate result than at any time in history,” LaRose said.
Citizen groups push to abolish voting machines
LaRose’s legal memo was a response to a statewide push by a group calling itself the Coalition of Concerned Voters of Ohio. The group had been trying to abolish voting machines at the local level by organizing countywide votes in each of Ohio’s 88 counties.
The group only got enough voter signatures to put the issue before voters in two counties, Seneca and Monroe, ahead of a deadline last week to schedule local ballot issues for the November election. That’s when LaRose stepped in, blocking those efforts.
Sarah Arend, a Republican, was the only Monroe County elections board member to vote to reject LaRose’s advice. In an interview, Arend said local Republicans appointed her to the Monroe County elections board in January against a backdrop of local anti-voting machine activism. Arend said the activisms was fueled by the elections board’s decision to reject a call by some citizens – who believed the machines were inaccurate – to audit all 6,903 votes cast within the counuty in last November’s presidential election.
Arend, who also claims the voting machines are too expensive, criticized LaRose for blocking the citizen-led petition drive. She said large counties might prefer to use machines to cast and count votes.
“But in small counties that don’t have big budgets and can’t afford them, how dare the state say that you can’t choose another method when we’re paying for it?” Arend said.
Monroe and other counties already conduct post-election audits, but generally do so by using a statistical sample of the vote, rather than auditing every single ballot. All 88 counties had a 100% accuracy rate for the November election, according to LaRose’s office. Counties do have a protocol for reviewing every ballot for accuracy, but only do so if they find inaccuracies during their initial audit.
Broader anti-voting machine sentiment is brewing within GOP
Marcell Strbich is a figure in the state’s conservative movement questioning election integrity and is running as a Republican to replace LaRose, who can’t seek re-election next year because of term limits. Strbich criticized LaRose’s decision, calling it “anti-liberty” in a social media post. (Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague is also running for the Republican nomination.)
The push to repeal the voting machines in Monroe and Seneca County is just the latest political flare-up over voting machines in Ohio. It follows President Donald Trump’s campaign to sow doubts about voting machines after he lost the November 2020 election, though he carried Ohio.
Citizens in Stark County sued the local board of election in 2021 to block the purchase of new voting machines in a case lasted three years. The Ohio Supreme Court eventually found that the local elections board illegally discussed buying the voting machines in a closed-door executive session but the court didn’t overturn the purchase.
That lawsuit occurred in parallel to another case in which the Stark County Board of Elections sued the county commissioners for failing to approve the purchase of the voting machines, eventually getting the Ohio Supreme Court to order the county to do so.
LaRose, elections officials say Ohio’s voting system is accurate
Aaron Ockerman, director of the Ohio Elections Officials Association, a lobbying group for the state’s bipartisan elections officials, said the anti-voting machine group is active in multiple counties across the state but represents only a vocal minority of people.
“Polling shows there’s a lot of belief in our election system around the country and in Ohio,” Ockerman said in an interview. ‘I think we’re happy to address the concerns of a very small portion of our electorate that has them.”
As he has for years, LaRose also defended the accuracy of Ohio’s elections, which are overseen in all 88 counties by a bipartisan team of Republicans and Democrats.
He also pointed out that voting machines are never connected to the Internet or wirelessly to any other device, that they produce a paper trail and that post-election audits regularly affirm the accuracy of the results.
He said that over the years, he’s occasionally heard from people who claim that voting machines switch their votes. He said he’d take the claims seriously if they had any evidence to support them.
“I’ve never found credible evidence of that happening in my six and a half years as Secretary of State,” he said.
He said elections integrity activists are well-intentioned but focused on the wrong weaknesses in the election system.
“When someone believes something deeply and is convinced of it it can be a challenge to present new facts to them,” LaRose said.