COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose said Monday that voter fraud is “exceedingly rare” as his office announced it had referred 13 votes cast last year for further investigation as possible voter fraud.
The 13 votes -- or a tiny fraction of 1% of the 5.9 million votes cast during November’s presidential election -- came from non-citizens who illegally cast a ballot, LaRose said. In Ohio, it is a felony for non-citizens to register to vote or to cast a ballot. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, will review the cases for potential prosecution.
State officials regularly cross-reference voting records with BMV records, which list someone’s citizenship status on their driver’s license. LaRose said his office also referred 104 instances in which non-citizens registered to vote but didn’t cast a ballot.
Democrats have criticized LaRose, a Republican, and his GOP predecessors for publicizing rare instances of voter fraud, saying it creates a false impression. But LaRose said he does so to emphasize how rare it is.
“What Ohioans should know is that voter fraud is exceedingly rare in Ohio and when it occurs, we take it seriously,” LaRose said.
The number is in line with previous years. Not all referrals for prosecution have resulted in charges. Elections officials have said that sometimes, non-citizens who are elderly or for whom English is not their first language register to vote unintentionally.
None of the 13 cases involving actual ballots cast were from Northeast Ohio, although the 104 cases included 14 instances from Cuyahoga County and 4 from Lake County. LaRose said he wasn’t aware of the 13 ballots affecting the results of any election.
LaRose said it’s possible that someone, while applying for a driver’s license, was handed a voter-registration form and filled it out without realizing they had committed a crime. That’s why his office said it attempted to contact all non-citizens who it found had registered to vote, including the 117 cases it announced on Monday, asking them to withdraw their registrations. For the cases they referred, the person did not respond, LaRose said.
LaRose said he is only aware of a “handful” of instances of what people typically think of as voter fraud -- when someone casts a ballot in someone else’s name -- from last year’s election. In one instance, a township elected official, a Republican, in Delaware County pleaded guilty in June to casting a ballot in his dead father’s name, the Columbus Dispatch reported. LaRose’s office said earlier this year that dysfunction at the Summit County Board of Elections led to one instance of someone voting in a dead person’s name.
LaRose announced the new referrals amid a heightened concern over elections integrity, especially among Republican voters, prompted by former President Donald Trump’s false claims about the November election. Trump won Ohio in November by 8 points, and Ohio generally has not been the target of voter-fraud claims.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump supporters from making them. In Stark County, Trump supporters successfully lobbied county commissioners to block a purchase of voting machines by the local board of election. After the elections board sued, the Ohio Supreme Court issued an order forcing commissioners to approve the purchase. And a teacher from Cincinnati who has claimed his mathematical analysis proves widespread fraud in Ohio was an invited speaker at last month’s Trump rally in Lorain County,
LaRose said his top staff recently met for two hours with the teacher and Joe Blystone, a fringe challenger to Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.
LaRose said Ohio’s voting machines are never connected to the Internet, and that a post-elections audit found 99.98% accuracy for the vote totals. He said the teacher’s claims were meritless.
“We’re going to take that kind of thing seriously when someone holds those kinds of allegations, and fortunately, those allegations were very easily disproven,” LaRose said.