October 7, 2025 • 9 mins
Ohio Secretary of State, Frank LaRose gives some tips on how you can make the best informed decision as you head to the polls
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Let's go over and check in with Frank Laro's Ohio
Secretary of State on the Legacy Retirement Group dot com
phone line. Frank, it's hard to believe we're less than
a month away from election day, November fourth. Busy time
for you and your office, as early voting is open now.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Good morning, Frank, how are you?
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Yeah, it's election season. Official election days four weeks away,
but you can vote starting today at your county Board
of Elections. All eighty eight county boards of Elections are
open for early voting starting at eight o'clock this morning,
and you can find those locations and hours on our
website boot Ohio dot gov.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
This is it's an off yr election, Frank.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
People love to vote for president, but I could argue
that these off your elections more important in some situations.
These local issues you've got, you know, the property tax levies,
school levees, you know, voting for local issues, races, school boards,
you know, the township trustees, city councils.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Those types of things.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Because as they say, all politics is local, and it's
important to get out and vote even in these off
your elections.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Huge impact on your daily life. I mean, yeah, you're right,
we all get excited about presidential elections, gubernatorial elections. We
get to vote for governor next year, but what matters
more than who lives in the White House is probably
who works at the courthouse and the schoolhouse. Those are
the decisions that we make this year. And think about this.
In one of these local elections, the winner could be
(01:27):
decided by a dozen votes. I mean, if you look
at these results, it's not uncommon for six to eight
ten votes to make the difference between who's the mayor
and who's not, who's your city council member and who's not.
And just do a little bit of research. If you
go to our website, you can see what's called your
sample ballot. What holds some people back is they say,
(01:49):
I don't know enough, I don't want to guess, I
don't want to just play eeny meenie money moe with
my ballot, and so they stay away from these local elections.
But if you just go to vote Ohio dot go,
you can literally print off what's called a sample ballot.
You can see exactly what's going to be on your ballot,
and you can do a few minutes worth of research
and be an informed voter.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Ohio Secret Terry State Frank LeRose joining me. So it
isn't off your election. Do you have any data in
the last several months about voter registration's over now for
this cycle?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
But do you have any data on new voter registration
this time around? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Absolutely. In fact, get your timing is perfect because just
yesterday we launched a new voter registration data dashboard. This
is stuff that's been available on our website for a
long time, but you had to get it as like
a downloadable CSV file, and you basically had to have
a PhD in statistics be able to figure it out.
(02:45):
We've turned all of this with this transparency initiative that
we call the Data Act, a bill that we passed
a couple of years ago, into these visualized data dashboards.
It's easy to look at and so as you go
to our website ohios dot gov slash data, you can
click around, look at your county, look at the whole state,
(03:06):
look at how many registered Republicans, how many registered Democrats,
what ages. You can completely geek out on voter registration
data in a very visual, user friendly kind of way.
Ohio soos dot gov slash data. While you're there, We've
also got data dashboards that we've built for early voting patterns,
and so you can see how many people have voted early,
(03:27):
and how many people have requested at st ballad all
kinds of other useful information on there. But here's the
other piece of good news. We've been doing our work,
as we're required to do, and as I've done aggressively
for gosh seven years now, to remove bad data from
the voter rules. Now, the Democrats will will cry and
(03:48):
say that I'm purging voters from the voter rules. No
such thing. We're taking dead people off. We do that
on a monthly basis. That shouldn't be controversial. We make
sure that only American citizens can register to vote, and
if you move out of state and vote in another state,
we're going to catch that and we're going to remove
you from the voter rolls. So yeah, we've removed a
few hundred thousand from the voter rolls this summer. But
(04:10):
those aren't voters. It's bad data that we're taking off
the voter roule.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
I'm glad you brought that up, Frank, because I was
reading a story. Well it was a story from a
couple of months ago. Your office was sued by an
activist operation that I had never heard of. Because you
are requiring people to actually show ID when they go
to the BMV and vote, to prove that they are
a US citizen. As you say that that should not
(04:36):
be controversial, that it's outrageous that there are people out
there that think that you should be able to go
vote and not prove that you are who you say
you are.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Yeah, this is a guy named Mark Elias. It was
Hillary Clinton's lawyer. This is the guy that cooked up
the whole Steel dossier thing. That's what he's sort of
infamous for. He is the attack dog lawyer on the
far left, funded by all these dark money groups. And so, yeah,
we've told the bmvs for years, if somebody's a non citizen,
don't give them a voter registration form. Really, it's entrapment.
(05:07):
All you're doing is incentivizing them to commit a felony.
If somebody, if we have documentary proof at the BMV
that you're a non citizen, we're not going to give
you a voter reg form. That's a stupid idea. Well,
the state legislature codified that. They put it in a
state law earlier. This year, which is smart to make
it ongoing practice. And this guy suit us work. This
is the same guy that suit us last year because
(05:28):
we told the poll workers to check the ID card
and if it said non citizen, we're not going to
give you a ballot. And so we're going to win
this lawsuit just like we won the last one.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
It's so controversial. I can't believe that you're actually requiring
people to prove who they are. It's frank, how dare you?
How dare you? It's unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
You mentioned dark.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Money and some of the influences on elections, you know,
in ad campaigns and so forth.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Are we going to see around of that?
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Maybe not maybe this cycle, but I would imagine you'll
see that for sure next year.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
You absolutely will. Although we have worked to outlaw foreign
funding for issue campaigns, a lot of these things now
show up as constitutional amendments. There could be three or four,
maybe even five constitutional amendments on the ballot next year
if these groups are able to gather all their signatures.
I'm not a big fan of that. That's called direct
(06:18):
democracy versus representative democracy. Starting to look like the way
California has run itself over the last few decades. But
if you see all of these issues on the ballot,
there's going to be a lot of money coming in
from out of state. We can't stop that, but we
have made it illegal for foreign entities to fund issue campaigns.
And that's exactly what happened in Ohio a couple of
(06:39):
years ago with the redistricting issue, with the abortion issue,
it received funding in many cases from this Swiss billionaire
literally a guy from Switzerland named Hans George Vies. We've
outlawed that they're going to try and we're going to
catch them if they do it, and you.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Don't you legally have to say who paid for whatever
ad you're seeing?
Speaker 2 (07:02):
And I think that's correct.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
And then part two is don't these dark money operations
from overseas? Can't they send money in and funnel it
through and launder it so you don't really know where
the money is coming from.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Yeah, so this is where it is challenging. So disclaimers
are required, you know, paid for by Frank's campaign for whatever, right,
that's the normal process. The problem with a lot of
these dark money groups is they create a new entity.
This is Ohioans for Puppy Dogs and it was just created,
and you're gonna you know, fund the ad with it,
and then it's going to go defunct. And so it
(07:35):
may say, you know, funded by Ohioans for Ohio, and
you're not going to know who the heck that is
because it's a group that just was created to run
that ad. So that's a difficulty with transparencies. But also,
as you mentioned, you called it what I call it
political money laundering, and this is the challenge with some
of these foreign entities, is that a foreign billionaire will
(07:58):
give a bunch of money to a non profit, that
gives it to an LLC, that gives it to another LLC,
and it bounces around from all these different legal entities
and it pops out the other end as oh, I
don't know, ten million dollars worth of television ads in
the state of Ohio. It's very hard to track down.
It is very clearly illegal, though, and that's why we've
(08:19):
created an investigative team, people with a history of investigating
financial crimes and that kind of thing, so that when
this kind of stuff does happen, we have a good
shot of being able to follow the money. But it
is it's like that old that that show on TV
where they were, you know, doing all the money laundering Ozark.
It's really hard to catch a very good money launderer.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Who can't get behind Ohio wins for puppy dogs. I
don't know.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
That's that's something I can give my staff of approofal for. Well, Frank,
you're one of the good guys. You're doing a great
job Ohio Secretary State, one of the best in the business,
and you're going to be running. You are running for
state auditor next year. How's a campaign so far?
Speaker 3 (09:00):
You know, it's great, it's a funny thing. Maybe it's
peace through strength. I don't have an opponent so far.
I was really excited to run for state Auditor because
it's all about catching crooks that are stealing public money,
and it's about making government more efficient. The auditor's office
if used correctly, and our current auditor is doing a
great job, but the Auditor's office is really Ohio doge.
(09:23):
It's a chance to make local and state government operate
more efficiently. So I got excited to run, launched my campaign,
raise some money. In fact, I've got a fundraiser tonight
and close. I raised some money and sure enough, nobody
else has filed to run. So far, so so far.
It's an open field. Anybody that wants to run. All
you got to do is go, gather a bunch of
(09:43):
signatures and raise a bunch of money
Let's go over and check in with Frank Laro's Ohio
Secretary of State on the Legacy Retirement Group dot com
phone line. Frank, it's hard to believe we're less than
a month away from election day, November fourth. Busy time
for you and your office, as early voting is open now.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Good morning, Frank, how are you?
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Yeah, it's election season. Official election days four weeks away,
but you can vote starting today at your county Board
of Elections. All eighty eight county boards of Elections are
open for early voting starting at eight o'clock this morning,
and you can find those locations and hours on our
website boot Ohio dot gov.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
This is it's an off yr election, Frank.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
People love to vote for president, but I could argue
that these off your elections more important in some situations.
These local issues you've got, you know, the property tax levies,
school levees, you know, voting for local issues, races, school boards,
you know, the township trustees, city councils.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Those types of things.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Because as they say, all politics is local, and it's
important to get out and vote even in these off
your elections.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Huge impact on your daily life. I mean, yeah, you're right,
we all get excited about presidential elections, gubernatorial elections. We
get to vote for governor next year, but what matters
more than who lives in the White House is probably
who works at the courthouse and the schoolhouse. Those are
the decisions that we make this year. And think about this.
In one of these local elections, the winner could be
(01:27):
decided by a dozen votes. I mean, if you look
at these results, it's not uncommon for six to eight
ten votes to make the difference between who's the mayor
and who's not, who's your city council member and who's not.
And just do a little bit of research. If you
go to our website, you can see what's called your
sample ballot. What holds some people back is they say,
(01:49):
I don't know enough, I don't want to guess, I
don't want to just play eeny meenie money moe with
my ballot, and so they stay away from these local elections.
But if you just go to vote Ohio dot go,
you can literally print off what's called a sample ballot.
You can see exactly what's going to be on your ballot,
and you can do a few minutes worth of research
and be an informed voter.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Ohio Secret Terry State Frank LeRose joining me. So it
isn't off your election. Do you have any data in
the last several months about voter registration's over now for
this cycle?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
But do you have any data on new voter registration
this time around? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Absolutely. In fact, get your timing is perfect because just
yesterday we launched a new voter registration data dashboard. This
is stuff that's been available on our website for a
long time, but you had to get it as like
a downloadable CSV file, and you basically had to have
a PhD in statistics be able to figure it out.
(02:45):
We've turned all of this with this transparency initiative that
we call the Data Act, a bill that we passed
a couple of years ago, into these visualized data dashboards.
It's easy to look at and so as you go
to our website ohios dot gov slash data, you can
click around, look at your county, look at the whole state,
(03:06):
look at how many registered Republicans, how many registered Democrats,
what ages. You can completely geek out on voter registration
data in a very visual, user friendly kind of way.
Ohio soos dot gov slash data. While you're there, We've
also got data dashboards that we've built for early voting patterns,
and so you can see how many people have voted early,
(03:27):
and how many people have requested at st ballad all
kinds of other useful information on there. But here's the
other piece of good news. We've been doing our work,
as we're required to do, and as I've done aggressively
for gosh seven years now, to remove bad data from
the voter rules. Now, the Democrats will will cry and
(03:48):
say that I'm purging voters from the voter rules. No
such thing. We're taking dead people off. We do that
on a monthly basis. That shouldn't be controversial. We make
sure that only American citizens can register to vote, and
if you move out of state and vote in another state,
we're going to catch that and we're going to remove
you from the voter rolls. So yeah, we've removed a
few hundred thousand from the voter rolls this summer. But
(04:10):
those aren't voters. It's bad data that we're taking off
the voter roule.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
I'm glad you brought that up, Frank, because I was
reading a story. Well it was a story from a
couple of months ago. Your office was sued by an
activist operation that I had never heard of. Because you
are requiring people to actually show ID when they go
to the BMV and vote, to prove that they are
a US citizen. As you say that that should not
(04:36):
be controversial, that it's outrageous that there are people out
there that think that you should be able to go
vote and not prove that you are who you say
you are.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Yeah, this is a guy named Mark Elias. It was
Hillary Clinton's lawyer. This is the guy that cooked up
the whole Steel dossier thing. That's what he's sort of
infamous for. He is the attack dog lawyer on the
far left, funded by all these dark money groups. And so, yeah,
we've told the bmvs for years, if somebody's a non citizen,
don't give them a voter registration form. Really, it's entrapment.
(05:07):
All you're doing is incentivizing them to commit a felony.
If somebody, if we have documentary proof at the BMV
that you're a non citizen, we're not going to give
you a voter reg form. That's a stupid idea. Well,
the state legislature codified that. They put it in a
state law earlier. This year, which is smart to make
it ongoing practice. And this guy suit us work. This
is the same guy that suit us last year because
(05:28):
we told the poll workers to check the ID card
and if it said non citizen, we're not going to
give you a ballot. And so we're going to win
this lawsuit just like we won the last one.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
It's so controversial. I can't believe that you're actually requiring
people to prove who they are. It's frank, how dare you?
How dare you? It's unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
You mentioned dark.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Money and some of the influences on elections, you know,
in ad campaigns and so forth.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Are we going to see around of that?
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Maybe not maybe this cycle, but I would imagine you'll
see that for sure next year.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
You absolutely will. Although we have worked to outlaw foreign
funding for issue campaigns, a lot of these things now
show up as constitutional amendments. There could be three or four,
maybe even five constitutional amendments on the ballot next year
if these groups are able to gather all their signatures.
I'm not a big fan of that. That's called direct
(06:18):
democracy versus representative democracy. Starting to look like the way
California has run itself over the last few decades. But
if you see all of these issues on the ballot,
there's going to be a lot of money coming in
from out of state. We can't stop that, but we
have made it illegal for foreign entities to fund issue campaigns.
And that's exactly what happened in Ohio a couple of
(06:39):
years ago with the redistricting issue, with the abortion issue,
it received funding in many cases from this Swiss billionaire
literally a guy from Switzerland named Hans George Vies. We've
outlawed that they're going to try and we're going to
catch them if they do it, and you.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Don't you legally have to say who paid for whatever
ad you're seeing?
Speaker 2 (07:02):
And I think that's correct.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
And then part two is don't these dark money operations
from overseas? Can't they send money in and funnel it
through and launder it so you don't really know where
the money is coming from.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Yeah, so this is where it is challenging. So disclaimers
are required, you know, paid for by Frank's campaign for whatever, right,
that's the normal process. The problem with a lot of
these dark money groups is they create a new entity.
This is Ohioans for Puppy Dogs and it was just created,
and you're gonna you know, fund the ad with it,
and then it's going to go defunct. And so it
(07:35):
may say, you know, funded by Ohioans for Ohio, and
you're not going to know who the heck that is
because it's a group that just was created to run
that ad. So that's a difficulty with transparencies. But also,
as you mentioned, you called it what I call it
political money laundering, and this is the challenge with some
of these foreign entities, is that a foreign billionaire will
(07:58):
give a bunch of money to a non profit, that
gives it to an LLC, that gives it to another LLC,
and it bounces around from all these different legal entities
and it pops out the other end as oh, I
don't know, ten million dollars worth of television ads in
the state of Ohio. It's very hard to track down.
It is very clearly illegal, though, and that's why we've
(08:19):
created an investigative team, people with a history of investigating
financial crimes and that kind of thing, so that when
this kind of stuff does happen, we have a good
shot of being able to follow the money. But it
is it's like that old that that show on TV
where they were, you know, doing all the money laundering Ozark.
It's really hard to catch a very good money launderer.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Who can't get behind Ohio wins for puppy dogs. I
don't know.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
That's that's something I can give my staff of approofal for. Well, Frank,
you're one of the good guys. You're doing a great
job Ohio Secretary State, one of the best in the business,
and you're going to be running. You are running for
state auditor next year. How's a campaign so far?
Speaker 3 (09:00):
You know, it's great, it's a funny thing. Maybe it's
peace through strength. I don't have an opponent so far.
I was really excited to run for state Auditor because
it's all about catching crooks that are stealing public money,
and it's about making government more efficient. The auditor's office
if used correctly, and our current auditor is doing a
great job, but the Auditor's office is really Ohio doge.
(09:23):
It's a chance to make local and state government operate
more efficiently. So I got excited to run, launched my campaign,
raise some money. In fact, I've got a fundraiser tonight
and close. I raised some money and sure enough, nobody
else has filed to run. So far, so so far.
It's an open field. Anybody that wants to run. All
you got to do is go, gather a bunch of
(09:43):
signatures and raise a bunch of money
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