by J.D. Davidson
After local prosecutors and law enforcement agencies passed on investigating further or prosecuting claims of election law violations, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose wants the state’s attorney general to take over.
LaRose says he has sent evidence of more than 600 election law violations to county prosecutors since 2019 that have not been pursued.
“Unfortunately, many of these referrals have not been pursued by law enforcement, sometimes by choice and other times due to limited prosecutorial capacity,” LaRose said. “State law gives the attorney general the authority to take up these referrals if the prosecuting attorney doesn’t prosecute the violations within a reasonable time. The only way to maintain Ohio’s high standard of election integrity is to enforce the law whenever it’s broken.”
LaRose said his office sent evidence of alleged violations of 633 people to law enforcement for things like apparently voting multiple times in the same state or two different states, fraud involving dead individuals and registration and voting violations by noncitizens.
He said county prosecutors have not charged 621.
The referral to Attorney General Dave Yost includes a breakdown of violations by year, violation type and documentation from boards of elections and other elected officials.
“We respect prosecutorial discretion, and we don’t necessarily expect all 633 referrals to lead to criminal charges, but only 12 out of 633 shows a second set of eyes might be needed here to determine whether prosecution of these crimes is justified,” Hun Yi, director of investigations for the Secretary of State’s Public Integrity Division, wrote in a letter to Yost. “Accordingly, county prosecutors have had more than ‘a reasonable time’ to prosecute the violations and apparently have chosen not to do so. We hereby respectfully request that you use your authority under Ohio Revised Code Section 109.95 to review these cases, utilizing your own discretion, and prosecute the violations as you see appropriate.”
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An Ohio native, J.D. Davidson is a veteran journalist with more than 30 years of experience in newspapers in Ohio, Georgia, Alabama and Texas. He has served as a reporter, editor, managing editor and publisher. Davidson is a regional editor for The Center Square.
