Ohio Sec of State Frank LaRose - Almost time for early voting

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
KRSE Detalk station. Very happy Wednesday to you, thanks to
Orlando suns If we're joining the program and we're going
to hear from Judge Napalatano at eight thirty Jason Williams
on the Bengals stadium upgrades one point two billion that's
later in the program. Is on in the meantime. Welcome
back to the fifty five KRC Morning Show. Frank LeRose,
Ohio Secretary of State. Welcome back, sir, It's always a
pleasure to have you on my program.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Well, Heyray Brian. Yeah, you know, yesterday was voter registration
day nationwide. We're reminding people that's only only a few
days left to go. October seventh is the deadline. Got
to get registered to vote if you're not already, or
update your information.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
Any indication statistics or compilations otherwise reflecting an increased number
of people registering, are we flat? I'm just kind of
wondering if there's more interest given it's a presidential election
and in terms of folks registering to vote or otherwise
updating their records.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, as much as we expect. Honestly, we're seeing the
same kind of same kind of high traffic at our
vote Ohio dot voter registration website that we would normally
see in a presidential election year. And that's a good thing,
is get eight million registered voters in the state of Ohio.
And we're also taking deceased voters off the rolls and

(01:12):
taking non citizens off and when people become inactive for
six years, so we make it both easy to vote
in hard to cheat. We're we're moving bad data from
the voting roles, and people can plain about that, but
it's my job. And we're also seeing high numbers of
voter registration.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
I don't want to complicate matters and get you in
an area where you feel out of your elements. So
please feel please feel free, because I am out of
my element. I with all the concerns about Donald Trump
and the assassination attempts a lot of people and I
think legitimately so are concerned that, well, what if something
happens either to Trump or Harris. For example, in the
waning days before November and voting day, ballots have already

(01:50):
been issued, names have already been placed on, deadlines have
come and gone. Is it possible to substitute a candidate
in the event of some tragedy between now and November,
and and how would we deal with that?

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah, this is a question for constitutional scholars. There's there's
a lot of different thought and writing out there. A
lot of it comes down to the party having the
opportunity to replace a candidate. But yeah, I don't want
to speculate on that. I will say that, you know,
we sell, we settle our political differences using ballots, not bullets.

(02:24):
And this the heated rhetoric calling Donald Trump an enemy
of democracy, and even the Cincinnati Inquirer running this silly
letter to the editor saying that he brought this on himself.
I mean, that kind of stuff has to stop, and
we should we should lower the temperature on the political

(02:46):
rhetoric a little bit. And there's just no place for
violence or for violent threats and that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Well, amen to that. And how about military voters. I
know overseas military folks quite often their votes aren't we
there's some suggestion maybe they're not counted or they're delayed.
How does that work? Secretary of State Lores Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Yeah, thanks for acting. Actually, this is something obviously I
have some personal experience, but I was that guy when
I served in Kosovo way back. That waited until like
the end of October to request my ballot, and of
course it didn't arrive until like Thanksgiving, so it was
far past a chance to vote. Yeah. I actually worked
on this when I was in the state Senate. I
passed the bill that created Ohio's more modernized system for

(03:31):
what we call yuakava voting, which just means uniformed and
overseas civilian voting, and that begins in two days. Yeah,
Friday is when overseason military voting begins, and they're able
to request their ballots right now. The boards of elections
can start transmitting those ballots on Friday, and that means

(03:51):
election season is here in forty eight hours. We have
an interesting way of doing this, and a lot of
people don't realize you can actually email mail someone their
ballot when they're serving overseas. Now they have to print it,
physically print it, and physically mail it back with a
wet ink signature on it. But by being able to
email them essentially a PDF of their ballot, it cuts

(04:14):
that transit time down of getting it to them. Sometimes
foreign mail systems and the US Defense Department mail system
moves kind of slow and so it cuts that transit
time down again. The physical copy has to get mailed back,
but they can get their ballot electronically and that begins
this Friday.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
This Friday, it's amazing how quickly this election is coming.
It's full steam. Ad pause, We'll bring back Secretary Secretary
State Frank LeRose, a nationwide issue concern over illegal immigrants
voting and registering to vote. We're going to talk to
them about purging the voting roles and potential election fraud
and what's being done about that also, and looking forward
to this conversation, a discussion about issue one, which is

(04:54):
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The traffic backing up towards seventy five northbound fourth seventy
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Speaker 1 (06:54):
Brian Thomas with Oiosecretary Secretary of State Frank LeRose. Let's
pivot to the idea of the vote or fraud and
perhaps illegal immigrants voting in federal elections. What they're not
allowed to do registering to vote, whether or not they
actually vote. What are you doing to secure the well
the integrity of vote here in Ohio relative to this
influx of illegal immigrants. My understanding is they're entiled to

(07:17):
go get a driver's license, but you can automatically get
registered to vote, and that they don't check your immigration
status when you fill out that form. Where are we
in o Hio on that Secretary of State?

Speaker 2 (07:28):
Yeah, so a couple of things to update. And just
as far as terms here, we're talking about not just
illegal but also legal non citizens. Right, So for example,
those folks that we're talking about in springtid those are
legally here under UG status or whatever. A lot of
people are here with student visas or work visas, so
it's not just illegals. The other thing to be clear

(07:48):
about is in Ohio you have to be here on
legal status to get a driver's license or a state idea.
So if you run across the border and you're here
without any documentation, you can't be an ill legal and
get a driver's license in Ohio or a state ID.
But we also are taking this process really seriously in Ohio,
and I would challenge you to find there's no Secretary

(08:09):
of state in America that's doing more to identify non
citizens and remove them from the voter rules than we are.
We have this very simple idea that only Americans can
vote in American elections. It's our state constitution that says that.
It's also federal and state law now we work with
our BMV to identify once someone has registered to vote,

(08:31):
if they are a non citizen, we identify them and
then remove them from the voter rules. That process happens
very quickly, and it's an ongoing process. It's not a
static thing that just happened once. We're doing it as
we speak, and we'll continue to up through election day.
So the old thaying is, well, i'll clean it up
for the radio. If you mess around, you'll find out
if you attempt to register to vote in Ohio as

(08:52):
a non citizen, we will catch you, You'll be removed
from the voter rules, and I will refer you for prosecution.
I've already done this almost six hundred times this year
when we have found non citizens registering to vote. And
so this idea that you can get away with it
absolutely not in Ohio. And again, we believe that there
should be consequences when you break the law, and registering

(09:13):
to vote illegally is a felony, and I refer those
for prosecution. I testified in front of Congress about this
last week, and one of the reasons why they asked
me to come up and testify in Congress is that
Ohio has established itself as a leader in this, but
the federal government doesn't make it easy. In fact, they
put as many obstacles in my way as possible. They

(09:34):
don't give us access to several key databases for who's
a citizen and who's not. I'm actually considering filing a
lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security. Of course,
that need to work with the AG to do that,
and so we're working through those conversations. But DHS does
not give us access to databases which they are supposed
to give us access to. We do, however, use our

(09:55):
state VMV data. There is one federal database they will
let us use, but it is income complete, but it
gives us at least a good chance of finding and
removing those non citizens that attempt to register to vote.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
Tohile sounds to me like the federal government isn't really
necessarily willing to cooperate with you in your efforts to
keep illegals from voter, well not non citizens from voting, no.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
Question about it. And we've tried repeatedly to get access
to this they won't give it to us. And even
the one that they do give us access to, this
thing called the SAVE database requires us to pay a
fee every time we use it. So each query I do,
I have to pay the federal government a dollar fifty fee,
which is stupid, it's not even worth collecting. But fine,

(10:41):
we do that, and then we have to manually enter
all this data. So I've got a whole team of
people sitting there typing numbers into a federal database to
check these. But what we need to do is pass
what's called the Save Act. This was passed by Congress.
It was passed by Congress a few months ago, and
it's being held up in the Senate by none other
than Shared Brown and in his colleagues that don't want

(11:04):
it to pass, but it should. And it would require
front end citizen verification, which we can't do right now.
Right now, we can't do that on the front end.
It has to be this kind of look back once
someone has already filed a voter registration form, although we
do it very rapidly at Ohio. Fair enough.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
I was in an event with the Northeast Republican Women's
Group and I heard a presentation on this particular topic,
and I think it overlapped. I understand you met with
Jerome Corsi and Andrew Paquette about this alleged evidence of
a secret algorithm that's been encoded into the Ohio State
Board of Elections. And I understand that on Monday a
complaint was filed with you and the Ohio Secretary of

(11:42):
State with regarding this documentation on the cryptographic algorithm that
doctor Andrew Piquette found, and they say it was for
the purpose of covert data manipulation. Where are what is
this all about? And is this something you're taking seriously
or is this just conspiracy theory swirling around?

Speaker 2 (12:01):
So my approach and we get a lot of these
right now. This is not the only one. My team
did meet with this group, and we've met with others,
but we have dozens of these kinds of things that
pop up. They always seem to come right before an election.
Like we work on this three hundred and sixty five
days a year. But people, you know, come up with
these things. We take them seriously. I told my team
it's like this, if if they get a nine to

(12:21):
one one call, even if it's clearly a prank, they're
going to still send an officer out because they can't
take the chance of a false report not being false, right,
and so we take every one of these seriously. We
investigate these. That one that you're talking about in particular,
it seems like a lot of mathematicians with a lot
of sort of false assumptions looking at a massive database

(12:44):
of eight million registered voters and then trying to extrapolate
some data from that. That makes it look as though
there's some sort of cheating hab It seems to be
based on a lot of false assumptions and a lot
of you know, very complex mathematical analysis. To us, it
doesn't look like any sign that there's any you know,
anything that freus certainly if they brought us evidence, and

(13:05):
that's our challenge to them, is bring us evidence, not
just theories. We get, you know, regression analysis and hey,
look at this scatterplot and all of this stuff. Bring
us evidence, not just a theory, and then we'll pursue prosecution.
Of course, thus far they haven't brought us any evidence. Okay,
And the.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
Group that spoke at the Republican Women's Meeting said that
this has been brought up here to the Secretary of
State's office attention year after year. They're a legislative fixed that,
you know, even if this wasn't actually manipulated, that there's
ways around it to fix it, to ensure that nothing
can be manipulated. So at least that was the assertion
from the men who gave the presentation. I just I

(13:42):
know every one of my listeners has concerns about electronic
manipulation of the vote. You know, if you had a
paper ballot and it had to be physically counted and
it was right there, you could back you know, it's
easy to see and verify whether it was accurately counted
or not.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
That's one thing.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
But going through computers and concerns about Wi Fi is
being hacked and all that, I know, it's just a
big concern.

Speaker 2 (14:05):
So let me address that. What the group that you're
talking about is claiming is fraud with the voter registration system.
That's separate from fraud with actually counting and tabulating votes.
By the way, we have in Ohio one paper ballots
every ballot cast in Ohio. So we're going to talk
about now the security of the actual tabulation of votes.

(14:27):
Every vote cast in Ohio is on paper without exception.
One hundred percent of the time. We use machines that
are never connected to the internet. They're what we call
air gaps. They're not connected to anything other than the
wall outlet that powers them. Those get tested right now.
They're being tested by our county boards of Elections through
a full battery of tests called the Logic and Accuracy Test.

(14:47):
Democrat and Republican technical experts at each Board of Elections
test those those machines use. We use those on election
night to give you that rapid result. If you didn't
have that, you wouldn't get a result on election I
think you wouldn't got a result for a couple of weeks,
probably until after the election. Because every ballot in Ohio
may have fifteen twenty different questions on it. It's not

(15:07):
just one issue on the ballot, so hand counting all
of those on election night would be impossible. So we
use the machine to give you that rapid result on
election night, and then a few weeks later we count
all the paper and compare those electron compare those side
by side, right, so they have to reconcile. So it's
like this. People say you can't cheat with paper, Well

(15:28):
that's nonsense. Chicago in the nineteen sixties proved you can
cheat with paper any system. Right with people involved has
opportunities for those people to do the wrong thing. So
we have the redundancy of both an electronic count on
election night and then a paper hand count that have
to reconcile against each other. And that redundancy, that sort
of balancing the checkbook is why we have a very

(15:51):
secure and safe, reliable system for counting ballots in Ohio.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
To the extent it's even possible. I wanted to speak
of that Issue one. We're almost at a time. I'm
in know on want, I've looked into it. I know
that's where the Republican Party stands on in Ohio. Any
brief summary on Issue one and where you are Frank Leros.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
Well, actually, this morning we're holding a meeting of the
ballot board to make some very minor changes to the
ballot language. It's crucial that we get that done today
because those ballots get printed in two days for overseason
and military voters. As I told you, Issue one requires
a group of unaccountable individuals to gerrymander the state to

(16:29):
create a specific political outcome. That is true language, and
that's what the Ohio Supreme Court upheld. It's important for
Ohioans to try to understand this thing, thirteen thousand word
long amendment that requires jerrymandering and will result in all
kinds of really comported districts and that kind of thing.
The other thing to note is who's funding this twenty

(16:52):
six million dollars so far? Eighty five percent of that
money has come in from out of state, including six
million dollars from a Swiss billionaire who's trying to change
the way Ohio draws district lines. I think Ohilan should
reject this.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
That speaks volumes right there. Secretary State, Frank Loris, thanks
for the time you spend my listeners to me this
morning on the morning show. I'll look forward to talking
with you again and keep up the great work. Thanks Brian,
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