The Buckeye State is set to hire investigators who will look into accusations of voter fraud as a part of a larger effort to streamline and boost election integrity efforts in the state, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose detailed during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday.
LaRose rolled out the Public Integrity Division last week, an initiative aimed at organizing state and local power to keep bad actors from damaging a process central to maintaining a constitutional republic. The division will oversee various aspects of election integrity, including removing deceased voters from voters rolls, making sure only U.S. citizens can be registered to vote, boosting cyber security on a county-by-county level, and auditing campaign finance reports.
As for hiring investigators, LaRose said Ohio law, “for a long time” going back “many decades” dictates that the Secretary of State has the power to “investigate election fraud” and “election regularities.”
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“Those are my responsibilities under the law. But we’ve never had investigators. I’ve only been in this office a few years, but it always struck me: if it’s my job to investigate these things, shouldn’t I have a group of professional investigators? So, for many years, that task of investigating election fraud, or for that matter voter suppression, anything that would be a violation of election law has always fallen to a clerk — somebody who’s just an elections administrator,” LaRose told host and Washington, D.C., Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle.
“Maybe today they’re sending out absentee ballots for our overseas military personnel. Maybe tomorrow they’re training poll workers. To expect them [clerks] to then put on the hat of being an investigator is really not fair to them or to the voters,” LaRose continued.
LaRose said state’s plan is to hire people with a law enforcement background and law enforcement officers who specialized in areas like financial crimes.
“Because an election crime looks a lot like a financial crime, like embezzling or money laundering or whatever else,” he noted. “So it’s about combing through documents and putting people under oath and taking sworn statements — following the evidence wherever it leads. And that’s the skill that only a professional investigator has,” he continued.
LaRose added that the ultimate goal of hiring professional investigators is being able to turn “fully-baked, ready-to-go case[s]” over to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office “so they can take it into a courtroom and secure a prosecution and ultimately a conviction.”
LaRose said that election integrity is “a state and a local responsibility” and “a feature, not a glitch of the American system of elections…”
“We do not want the federal government administering elections, trust me. And so what we want try to do in Ohio is set an example for other states to follow,” he said, later adding that other secretaries of state are looking at his new system to potentially implement in their own states.
Boyle asked LaRose to address several arguments from the left on election integrity efforts, including claims that there is no proof of election fraud or that election fraud is a rare occurrence.
“The left has a lot of really hollow excuses for not doing this. They say, ‘oh, well listen, there’s no proof.’ Well, you’re right. If you’re not going to investigate it, you’re not going to find the proof…Let’s say out of 100 complaints, 80 of them are nonsense, just utter BS — but that means that there are 20 percent that are worth tracking down. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do,” LaRose responded. “The other argument that the left makes is they say, ‘Well, voter fraud is rare.’ I believe it is rare in Ohio but serious.”
“I’m a veteran and still serve as a reservist, but we would always do risk assessment by evaluating how likely something is to happen and also how catastrophic it is if it does happen. If something is rare and the results of it happening are not all that catastrophic, then you can probably put it aside,” he continued. “But if it’s rare and the results of it could make a big difference, then you absolutely have to look into it. And this is where I would put election fraud. Election fraud is rare, but when it happens, it’s serious. It makes a big difference.”
LaRose emphasized that in the last few years alone, 31 races in Ohio have “been determined by a coin flip because they were a dead tie.”
“Now, these tend to be local races for maybe city council or school board, but those are important offices. And so if a race like that could come down to a coin flip because of a tied vote, then one vote, one fraudulent vote, really does make a difference,” he said.
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