Secretary of State Frank LaRose said Saturday it’s not his office’s job to further investigate for evidence of possible election law violations before he flags them to county prosecutors, after they rebuffed LaRose’s call to act on cases he’s referred, calling the cases weak.
“What the law says is that we should report violations,” LaRose said. “It doesn’t say that we’re the police department that gathers the evidence.”
Last Tuesday, LaRose, the state’s top elections official, called out county prosecutors for only acting on a handful of cases his office handed over to them. LaRose turned over 633 cases in which he alleges non-citizens registered to vote or cast ballots, but only 12 are being prosecuted.
But the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association refuted LaRose’s claim that counties have let cases “languish.” Lou Tobin, the association’s executive director, characterized LaRose’s cases as mostly weak.
“These are referrals that often lack minimal evidence necessary to pursue charges or pursue an indictment, let alone obtain a conviction," Tobin said last week.
Sometimes, prosecutors will chase down a possible lead for it to yield nothing, he said. LaRose said he believes the state shouldn’t have to build the cases for prosecutors. Still, his office’s recently formed public integrity division will play a bigger role in packaging evidence for prosecutors in the future, he said.
The back-and-forth stems from LaRose’s re-referral of those cases to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.
“I have full confidence that our excellent attorney general takes this seriously and is going to dig into this,” LaRose said.
In a letter sent to LaRose’s office last week, Bridget Coontz, Yost’s chief counsel, wrote that Yost’s office doesn’t have the authority to investigate most of what was re-referred.
“The overwhelming majority of re-referrals sent to this office are voting registration rereferrals that a county prosecutor has not pursued,” the letter read. “Unfortunately, (the Ohio Revised Code) does not give this office any authority to do anything with those matters.”
Coontz continued by writing that Yost’s office will pursue the smaller number of possible illegal voting cases.
Voter fraud is rare. As the November election nears, LaRose has limited Ohioans’ use of secure ballot boxes at county boards of elections and is also pressing lawmakers to pass legislation so his office can ask Ohioans to prove they are a citizen when they register to vote.
Although LaRose re-referred 600 possible cases, more than 8 million residents were registered to vote in Ohio as of the March primary.
