ENDORSEMENT: Chelsea Clark for Ohio Secretary of State

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose is a skilled practitioner in one area — and it’s not in performing the SoS’s chief job: running elections in a fair and impartial manner to make sure all eligible voters have equal access to the ballot.

No, his main skill is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He wants you to simultaneously believe that, as our chief elections officer in 2020, Ohio’s election ran smoothly and was fraud-free, but also that voter fraud is such a threatening problem that he just created a “Public Integrity Division” to make sure there’s no illegal voting, casting suspicion on Ohio’s elections. He’s again claiming he’s identified a bunch of people who voted twice, “referring” them for potential prosecution. Even if every accusation stood up (and so far we haven’t seen this), the number is minuscule compared to the number of Ohio votes cast.

LaRose is fond of saying that his new division is needed because although voter fraud is rare, there’s a “crisis of confidence” in our elections. He might look in a mirror, or a picture of his good buddy Donald Trump, if he wants to see what’s driving that.

LaRose’s announcement of this new division has been met with well-earned derision on social media. Commenters have been asking if its investigations will include why the Republicans on the redistricting commission, who include LaRose, chose to defy the state constitution and the will of the voters by drawing illegal, gerrymandered district maps — over and over and over.

After Secretary of State Ken Blackwell ran a 2004 presidential election so screwed up that Ohio became a national joke, it’s hard to believe any SoS could be worse. But the slick, ambitious Frank LaRose is. (It’s an open secret he wants to run for U.S. Senate against Sherrod Brown in 2024.)

It’s absolutely time for change in this office: time to vote on November 8 (or earlier, now that early voting has started) for Democrat Chelsea Clark, a small business owner and councilwoman in Forest Park City in Hamilton County, its second largest city after Cincinnati.

She says, “Ohio was once a leader in voting rights, but now we only make news when politicians engage in voter suppression. We need a Secretary of State who will prioritize fairness, accessibility and efficiency at the ballot box.” She’s vowed to stop the voter purges LaRose indulged in, expand early voting days and hours, introduce same-day registration, allow online voter registration and absentee ballot requests, and create an opt-in for voters to automatically receive mail ballots. Some Republicans will howl that such measures will lead to more fraud, but many states have already adopted them without seeing that happen.

Clark has also said she’d like to improve our state’s cybersecurity to block foreign interference in elections, modernize the statewide voter registration base and remove loopholes that allow for dark money to flood into elections without voters being able to identify its source. But most important, she is committed to fair districts that reflect Ohio’s voters, not the desire of politicians to stay in office .

In an interview with Democracy Docket, she said, “We’re operating in a system that’s being intentionally broken. The system is not broken in and of itself. It’s got pressures on it that are making it crack and break and crumble because this is all a threat to our democracy.”

Frank LaRose is complicit in breaking Ohio’s elections.

Learn more about Chelsea Clark at chelseaforohio.com/issues

 

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