Last week Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose unveiled a program to beef up election integrity efforts in the state. The Public Integrity Division will consolidate “many of the office’s current investigative functions, including campaign finance reporting, voting system certification, voter registration integrity, the investigation of election law violations, data retention & transparency, and cybersecurity protocols,” according to a press release from LaRose’s office.
The secretary of state’s office plans to hire a team of investigators to handle allegations of voter fraud and other election irregularities.
“If we’re responsible for investigating election fraud, shouldn’t we have investigators?” LaRose told PJ Media in an interview. “And it kind of begs the question, why didn’t this office have that a long time ago?” The task in the past has fallen to election administrators who may not have the background or experience to investigate voter fraud.
“And so what happens is that a lot of times they don’t do a purposeful job of trying to gather information, trying to gather evidence” because “they don’t have the experience that, say, a detective would have or somebody with a law enforcement background, and often don’t understand the rules of evidence that have to be followed in order for evidence to be admissible in a court,” he said. “They may not know that you have to put a witness under oath before they can take a sworn statement on all of the things that go into a proper investigation.”
LaRose plans to hire two full-time investigators at first and may scale that up at a later date. “These investigators can look into instances of voter fraud or, for that matter, voter suppression. Both of those things are illegal. Both of those things are immoral. We’re not going to tolerate somebody suppressing the vote. We’re not going to tolerate somebody committing election fraud,” he declared, adding that the investigators will also be working on campaign finance violations in Ohio.
Currently, many voter fraud complaints are handled at the local level. “Somebody will walk into the board of elections and say, ‘I believe that the following bad things happened’ … or they’ll call the board of elections. The board will then generally say, ‘all right, we’re gonna assign this person to look into it.'” LaRose said that once trained professional investigators are in place, he expects to see many of these complaints referred to his office. “And I think that, eventually, we’ll end up scaling up beyond just the initial two we’re going to start with.” He explained that his office is searching for investigators who have law enforcement experience—investigators, detectives, or individuals with experience in financial crimes.
“The kinds of crimes that we’re talking about are not like a murder scene where there’s physical evidence to look through or whatever else. It’s more of a paper-based crime. It’s an administrative kind of crime. And so the same skill set that maybe somebody used in a career of investigating financial crimes, money laundering, extortion, etc., those same kinds of skill sets can come to bear here, so we’re going to start putting out feelers and looking for people to help us so that we can hire somebody in the next month or two.” While the new investigators will likely not be hired until after the midterm election, he noted that that’s “when we would have gotten reports of things that happened throughout this election cycle, and then the investigation can begin.”
LaRose pointed out that this effort is in partnership with the Ohio Attorney General’s Office. “These things [cases] take a few months to process, to actually build enough evidence to take to a county prosecutor,” he said. “That’s really how this process will play out. We will build the case to the point where we have exhausted our abilities, and then take it to the county prosecutor or take it to the Ohio attorney general and say, ‘Here you go, we’re sort of serving this up to you, all ready to go… all you’ve got to do is take this in front of the judge, and we think you can secure a conviction.”
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LaRose said that he’s already beginning to hear from other secretaries of state, asking about the program. “I think this is just the latest example of Ohio kind of being a national leader,” he said. “I think you’re going to start seeing other secretaries of state that really want to do this as well, and I hope they hope they copy what we’re doing here in Ohio because having professional investigators in place to actually uncover the facts on something like this is going to be important going forward.”
“I think that Ohio runs elections better than any other state,” he said. “There are a lot of reasons why Ohioans should be confident in their elections. And the more we can do to demonstrate that, to show people that Ohio runs clean elections, the better … I want the word to go out that if you commit an election-related crime in Ohio that you will be caught and you will face justice for that, and that’s what this division is all about.”
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