Ohio was among a dozen states that turned over voter registration data requested by the Trump administration. Secretary of State Frank LaRose said he's confident in making that decision. But in his first interview since returning after being deployed with the Ohio National Guard, he breaks from President Trump on other issues.
Information on nearly eight million registered Ohio voters requested by the Department of Justice was sent, including driver's license numbers, dates of birth, last four digits of Social Security numbers. LaRose said Ohio does a good job in maintaining its voter rolls, and "we were happy to show our work to DOJ."
"Elections are run at the state level, no question about that. It's a state responsibility to run elections," LaRose said. "But the federal law is very clear that the US attorney general has the right to look at voter rolls to make sure that states are following the law as it relates to that."
The DOJ is suing 29 states for refusing to hand over the information, and that group includes blue and red states.
Ohio Democratic Party chair Kathleen Clyde called the decision “an egregious abuse of power.” Rep. Allison Russo (D-Upper Arlington), who’s running for the Democratic nomination for Secretary of State against Cincinnati doctor Bryan Hambley, filed a public records request with LaRose’s office to get more details about the data that was released. LaRose said he thinks these criticisms are "politically motivated stunts". He said some who spoke out against sharing voter data were concerned in 2023 when Ohio joined other Republican states in leaving the Electronic Registration Information Center, a multi-state voter database that he had once praised as "one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have".
Paper ballots have become an issue in the Republican primary for secretary of state, as Trump has praised the use of paper ballots.
Ohio law requires all voting machines to have a voter verified paper trail. The two Republicans running to replace Frank LaRose, Robert Sprague and Marcell Strbich, said Ohio shouldn’t use any electronic-only voting machines, and Strbich said he wants pen and paper marked ballots, which half of Ohio’s counties don’t even offer.
Paper ballot talk has also included hand-counting of those ballots. LaRose said hand counts are done post-election as an auditing measure, but that electronic counts on election night are more accurate and there’s less opportunity to manipulate the results.
“I think this is foolish that want to go to hand counted paper ballots. Now, if you hand count your ballots, you're not going to know the winner until, I don't know, Thanksgiving, several weeks after the election," LaRose said. "That's not going to be satisfactory to the people of Ohio.”
Trump has also said that he wants to ban no excuse absentee voting by mail, though he cast a ballot in Florida’s primary by mail last month. In 2024, 45% of Ohio voters cast ballots early, and nearly a third of those were mailed in.
Ohio has allowed no-excuse absentee voting since 2005, but some Republican lawmakers have said they’d like to dramatically cut back or even eliminate it. But that's an issue on which LaRose disagrees with Trump.
"I'm supportive of the statute that we have in place in Ohio. If the federal government wants to take action on this, that would have to go through Congress and that kind of thing, and we'll see what happens and be ready to respond to that," LaRose said. “There's always ways to improve that situation. There certainly are some vulnerabilities that exist with that. But the statute that Ohio has in place has been working now for many decades, and that's what we're going to continue to follow.”
But LaRose said he has concerns about the eight states that do universal mail in voting, where all voters are mailed ballots. But he strongly supports online voter registration, and sponsored the bill to allow it a decade ago. LaRose said the vast majority of new voters use to get registered as well as change their registration information.
LaRose returned last week from deployment with his Ohio National Guard unit to eastern Europe, where he said he was training foreign counterparts as an Army Green Beret.
