Ohio’s secretary of state is warning that if mail-in voting isn’t done carefully, “logistical and fraud problems” can result.
“If vote by mail is done well it can be a good, convenient and secure, safe option for people to cast a ballot,” said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. “If it’s done poorly, it can lead to problems – logistical and fraud problems – and everything else. I know that in Colorado, I know that in Ohio, we’ve put safeguards in place.”
The Republican made the remark during a Bipartisan Policy Center discussion on voting by mail, reported Just the News.
The issue of fraud in mail-in voting was raised this week in a series of tweets by President Trump that prompted a controversial “fact check” by Twitter. The company’s Site Integrity division, led by an employee who has called Trump officials Nazis, cited left-leaning news sources that dismiss the link to fraud.
However, Just the News noted, for example, that major mail voting problems in Paterson, New Jersey, city council elections, have prompted officials to call for a new election.
LaRose explained the actions his state is taking.
“We maintain accurate voter rolls. We require people to authenticate who they are with a name and an identification number,” he said. “When they request a ballot the signatures have to match. We have ballot tracking, so that individuals can track when it has been requested, just like you would track a package you order online. So that’s kind of a crowdsourcing way where the voter can take some responsibility to maintain the security of their actual ballot.”
Significantly, LaRose said, Ohio does not allow ballot harvesting.
In some states, such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey, party operatives or activists are allowed to collect ballots and deliver them to polling locations.
“We don’t allow that in Ohio. I think it’s superfluous anyway,” LaRose said. “If you have postage paid envelopes and you have drop boxes, you don’t need a partisan activist to be coming and picking up ballots. It has led to documented cases of fraud in other states like North Carolina where it was a member of my party who was convicted of fraud for that.”
Also, he said non-citizens who mistakenly were registered to vote are removed from the rolls.
“It’s usually a tiny number that have become registered to vote for whatever reason, and we remove those and if those individuals have proven intentionality and actually gone and cast a vote as a non-citizen then we do refer them for prosecution,” he said.
LaRose said that maintaining voter registration records is challenging.
“It’s a dynamic database that’s constantly changing by the second – people are turning 18, passing away, moving into the state and moving out of the state, that kind of thing,” he said. “I don’t maintain a statewide voter registration database. I wish we could. We have to compile that from each of the county boards of elections where 88 counties maintain theirs and I aggregate those up into one statewide database.”