Ohio Sec. of State Frank LaRose failing his basic duty of being an impartial election administrator

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. (Photo by WEWS.)

He’s done it again. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has deliberately sabotaged the ballot language of a citizens’ initiative on redistricting. He wants voters to defeat it in November so he’s manipulating the wording on the ballot summary to advance that objective.

I don’t know what happened to the state’s election chief. Early on LaRose had a solid reputation as a conscientious statewide official overseeing free, fair and highly accurate elections. For some reason, he threw it all away to become a political hack with zero respect. But I digress.

Last August, LaRose deliberately inserted loaded wording into another citizens’ initiative on abortion access. There was no question he wanted voters to defeat it in November 2023. Wrap your head around that; the top elections official in the state surreptitiously trying to influence the outcome of a statewide election issue.

LaRose, who was elected to impartially administer state elections, conspired with anti-abortion lobbyists to craft intentionally provocative ballot language on the abortion rights amendment to rig the results. Fortunately, Ohio voters saw through the secretary’s subterfuge.

They overwhelmingly passed the abortion rights amendment last year despite the LaRose scheme to sink it with patently prejudicial ballot wording. But far from being humbled by the stinging public rebuke at the polls, the state elections boss topped his dirty dealings on the Ohio Ballot Board with an even more outrageous ploy last week.

LaRose injected gobsmacking deceit into ballot language about the redistricting amendment statewide voters will decide this November. He’s trying to skew the outcome of another election!

LaRose produced a stunningly deceptive portrayal of the anti-gerrymandering proposal that would prohibit politicians from drawing their own districts to advantage themselves — the way it’s worked against voters for decades. Ohio’s elections leader characterized the referendum on redistricting reform as pro-gerrymandering, anti-voter and partisan. He lied.

The amendment to remove politicians from the redistricting process is similar to a Michigan law voters decisively supported in 2018 to curb extreme gerrymandering and draw fairer, nonpartisan districts. Like Michigan’s constitutional amendment, Ohio’s initiative would also establish an independent redistricting commission to replace the current system of entrenched political engineering.

The proposed amendment calls for a citizen-led, multi-party panel without political ties. Commission members, selected by retired judges, would be tasked with drawing competitive, nonpartisan congressional and state legislative district maps following strict constitutional rules on proportional fairness and public transparency.

It’s worth noting that the whole grassroots effort in Ohio — to mount a transformative change in how we conduct redistricting every ten years — only gained traction after state Republicans repeatedly thumbed their noses at voter-approved constitutional amendments already on the books and drew absurdly contorted districts to favor their party.

Citizens were keenly frustrated with Ohio GOP leaders who blithely ignored court orders to obey the state constitution and routinely submitted unconstitutional district maps until they ran out the clock with approaching elections. But LaRose wants voters to forget all that and accept his dishonest take on how much worse gerrymandering will be under a redistricting amendment designed to end it.

If LaRose prevails with his warped ballot wording on Issue 1 (the Citizens Not Politicians redistricting amendment) — challenges were immediately filed with the Ohio Supreme Court — he will again attempt to subvert fair play on another statewide issue. The chair of the state ballot board could have accepted a condensed, bullet-point text of the anti-gerrymandering initiative submitted by backers that was easy to follow and less than 200 words.

But LaRose chose to put his spin on the redistricting amendment ballot language with a loaded, 900-word “summary” that spans three pages to confuse voters with a deluge of specious screed. He even added gratuitous fear-mongering with phrasing about the referendum repealing “constitutional protections against gerrymandering approved by nearly three-quarters of Ohio electors” in 2015 and 2018.

Of course, those are the same constitutional protections LaRose and Republicans thumbed their noses at with seven straight sets of legislative and congressional maps the state supreme court declared unconstitutionally gerrymandered in Republicans’ favor. The secretary of state lied about citizen mapmakers being required to “gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio.”

He lied about the amendment’s restrictions on lobbyists and politicians influencing the map-drawing process also limiting citizen’s rights to free speech. And LaRose stooped to a slanted first impression in the title of the Issue 1 referendum to emphasize the proposed 15-member citizen redistricting commission is “not elected by or subject to removal by the voters of the state.”

On the Ohio Redistricting Commission, LaRose voted multiple times for unconstitutional, wildly gerrymandered maps that unfairly favored Republican incumbents in legislative and congressional districts. Yet he had the gall to begin the ballot language on the redistricting amendment by noting it would “eliminate the longstanding ability of Ohio citizens to hold their representatives accountable for establishing fair state legislative and congressional districts.” Please.

Retired Republican Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Conor, who helped draft the redistricting amendment, was bemused. LaRose’s lack of awareness about an electorate tired of being played for fools by partisan hacks is astounding. “Do the politicians not see how angry voters are when they keep breaking the law to protect their own power?”

In LaRose’s case, obviously not.

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