Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chuck Douglass and for Mark Glazer. Mark is back with
us tomorrow. I believe today is a recoup you know
what it is. Is it a recuperation day? Oh, he's
not in there. I think this is a recuperation day
from all the rest he got, and then he'll be
back with us tomorrow and everything will be back to
what's abnormal normal. And that's how it goes right off
the bat. Today got a guest in the studio because

(00:20):
you know the May fifth primaries right around the corner.
It is right you realize we're done with this month.
In what two days. April has gone, but it was
just April Fool's Day and poof the month is over already.
It's time that you start getting educated here from the candidates.
Go to events when you can go out hear them speak,

(00:41):
ask them questions. Get online. Google's a wonderful thing, but
there are so many different search engines out there. Do
your research. Participate in the process. I know it's not
a presidential election year, but it is still incumbent upon
you to vote, be a part of the process, or
sit down and shut up. Those are your options. Too

(01:01):
many people don't do anything. They don't push the button.
They whoever I saw the most commercials for, that's who
I vote for. Dummy, don't do that. Don't do that.
It's not about commercials, it's about it's about the human being,
the integrity behind the candidate. Uh, you're not going to
agree with every one one hundred percent of the time.
I don't agree with myself one hundred percent of the time.

(01:24):
That's why we have the phrase, you know, on second thought,
because we all we all have those those times when
we have to rethink things. And if you go out
looking for the perfect candidate who represents absolutely everything you
think you believe in at any given moment, you're not
going to find them. So you go find the best
match and the person who ultimately is going to do
their best to do the right thing when the time

(01:47):
comes to do something. If that makes sense to you, congratulations.
If it doesn't, oh, you're probably zach. Robert Sprague has
been in here several times in his capacity as kirk. However,
he's looking to change capacities. He will be on the
about here in the state of Ohio on May fifth.
He's in the studio today and we're going to talk

(02:09):
to you in that vein today as a as a
candidate Sprague as opposed to office holder Sprague. So try
to smile really really big when you answer the questions.
It comes over the radio, all.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Right, well, thanks for having me on today. I really
appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
Are you Are you having fun with this? I don't
know how many campaigns you've been in before. I have
no idea what your history of elected office is. Are
you an old pro the whole campaign thing?

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Or I tell you, I like going out and I
like talking with people, and people will tell you what
they think. And that's the most valuable type of campaigning.
When you can look people in the eye, you feel
the energy in the room. You have to answer their questions,
and then you have to prove to them that your
ideas are going to work and that you have a
vision for the office and that they're a part of

(02:57):
what you envisioned for the office and for the future
of our state. That's the only way this democracy, it's
the only way that our republic is going to function
for another two hundred and fifty years. And I've really
enjoyed it. I like it and it's been a great
campaign season.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
The concept of being secretary of State is one that
I don't know if most people really even know. If
I want a business license, I want to register a business,
or I want it voter information, I go to the
Secretary of State. The umbrella is actually much larger than that.
What are the responsibilities of a secretary of state? What
are you taking on when you take that job.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
So I'm running for Ohio Secretary of State to run
the most secure elections in the history of the state
of Ohio. And that's the primary job of the Secretary
of State is to run the elections of Ohio. Now
you know that we have local boards of elections and
we have both Republicans and Democrats. That's a feature of
our election system in Ohio. It's one of the reasons

(03:56):
that you can trust the election system here in our state,
our state, because we are common sense here in Ohio
and we have both parties participating equally. But ultimately, the
job of the Secretary State is to run elections. That's
the primary responsibility, and my goal is to run the
most secure elections in the history of the state.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
What last forty eight hours or so, we've heard about
allegedly some request for documentation from Washington for local boards
of elections here in the state of Ohio. Do you
have a heads up on any of that stuff? Do
you know what's going on? Is there anything is it posturing?
Is there something happening we don't know about.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
I mean, look, as a candidate, I don't have any
unique information. The FBI or Homeland Security or the Social
Security Administration is not telling me what they're asking for.
But what I can say is this, they already have
a lot of that information, right. They already have our
Social Security numbers, they already have our birth dates. The
federal government, as the matter of fact, are the only

(04:57):
ones that know who is an American citizen. And one
of the things I want to do is the next
Secretary of States so that the Department of Homeland Security
doesn't come knocking again, is I want to move us
to an up front citizenship check so that only American
citizens are voting in our Ohio elections. So that's the

(05:19):
first piece. You've got to get the registrations right. And
in addition to that, I think we need to take
an internal audit team and create that department within the
Secretaries of State's office to look at the current voter
registrations and make sure that non citizens are not on
the roles, they're not valid electors. Make sure the people
who have moved out of our state are no longer

(05:40):
on the roles, and make sure people that have passed
away are immediately taken off the voter rolls so that
the voter registration record is clean. That's the way you
prevent fraud on the back end and you run secure elections.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
And somethingen't is something as simple as is changing the
design or the color or whatever of state level IDs
driver's licenses. If you're not a citizen, you have a
you know, a purple license or something, then you can't
use that to go and show identification to vote. It's purple,
you can't vote. It's that simple. It doesn't seem like
it should be that difficult to within the various organizations

(06:16):
that run the state of Ohio and say, okay, DMV,
we need you to do this. Well, you know, state,
We're going to get everybody together and just say let's
make sure we can identify citizens versus non citizens. If
we're going to give them drivers licenses, at least know
that they're not citizen. Why has that become Why are
we at this level Why did nobody just solve that,

(06:36):
you know, years ago?

Speaker 2 (06:37):
Well, let me tell you. The first problem is you
got to get people to show their driver's license. Now
we have a two tier system in the state of Ohio.
If you show up in person, you have to show
a photo idea government issue photo ID. Why is that.
It's not to verify whether or not you're a citizen
or a resident. That's already been taken care of in
the registration record, if that makes sense. It's to verify

(06:59):
that you are who you say you are and that
you're a real person. So that's the reason for the
photo ID. But if you're vote by mail, and we've
sent almost a million ballots through the mail in the
last general election, you don't have to show a photo ID.
We have to remedy this, so as the next Secretary
of State of Ohio, I will require a universal photo ID,

(07:22):
so that no matter how you vote, you have to
present a photo ID. And I agree with President Trump
on this. We should declare election day a holiday and
we should go back to in person voting in the
great State of Ohio. Now, I'm still going to have
mail in ballots like we did before two thousand and

(07:43):
five for the people that need them, the people that
have a valid excuse. So if you're in the hospital,
if you're in a nursing home, if you're elderly, if
you are an EMT or your emergency services and you're
working that day, or you can't make it to the
polls for some other reason, you can vote absentee. But
for everyone who's able bodied, we need to show up

(08:03):
in person and vote, like we did from eighteen oh
three to the year two thousand and five, when we
finally and unfortunately moved to no fault absentee voting through
the mail. It's not secure and we need to secure
our elections and go back to in person voting.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
I heard, you know, the idea of making it a holiday,
and I thought, hey, okay, that's great. I go farther.
I say, you know, eleven fifty nine pm on Monday night,
get in line, just twenty four hours straight. Let's just
have the polls open. Go in vote in person, no excuses.
You've got twenty four hours of open polls and a
holiday on top of that. There's no reason you should
not be able to vote. As long as you are not,

(08:41):
you know, serving in the military, overseas or confined to
your home due to a handicap or something like that.
That should accommodate everybody.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
We have thirty days of earlier than that. Christ Now
you can show up. Nobody's being disenfranchised. Let me tell
you why people don't show up to vote. They don't
show up to vote, or they don't vote. Not because
it's too hard. They don't vote because they don't think
they're vote matters. They don't think that it's consequential. And
as the next Secretary State, my mission is to make

(09:12):
sure that we run the most secure elections in the
history of the state of ohioland that your vote counts.
And you know that your vote counts because many of
these races come down to just a handful of votes
for township trustee, a couple hundred votes for state representative
or state senator. And you remember the two thousand election
with Bush and Gore. How many votes was that six hundred?

(09:33):
Fewer than six hundred that determine the president of the
United States of America. These elections matter, Your vote matters,
and the security the elections matter. And what we're seeing
and we're talking a little bit about the fraud before
we went on air, is that if people can commit fraud,
they will commit fraud, and we can't have that in
our election system. So we've got to put these common

(09:54):
sense security measures in place. And another piece of this
is we have a law against ballot harvesting. In other words,
despite you know, if you're a nursing home worker, you
can't go in and help somebody vote and then grab
their you know, fifty ballots and go stuff them in
a ballot drop box. We need to eliminate the dropboxes

(10:16):
because they're you know, they're monitored via video, but you
can't tell who's submitting those ballots, and they're unnecessary. They're
a creature of the covid era and you can walk
the extra fifty feet and hand it to a member
of the Board of Elections while they're open from eight
to five that day.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
I have an ethical issue that I've never There is
no answer to it, but this is something when it
comes to voting in general, and here in the Ohio,
especially when you're eighteen and you are registered. You can
vote if you are a citizen of this country. We
can't go back to the poll taxes, We can't go
back to all of those discriminatory things of bygone eras.

(10:58):
But you know it was I think Bill Clinton's second
election when I'm standing in line and there was a
guy who was standing in line behind me. He was
over eighteen. Physically, he had the mentality of probably a
three or four year old child. Does anybody ever discuss

(11:20):
this or is that kind of a taboo thing that
nobody wants to put their hands on. I mean, if
you don't have the mental capacity to actually vote your
own conscience, to review the candidates, the issues, go in
there and cast an informed vote, should you be voting?
That's I know, it's a hard question. I can't figure
out what the answer would be, but it's been bugging

(11:42):
me for years.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
Let me tell you, as Americans, we have these fundamental
rights that were outlined by Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration
of Independence, which we're going to celebrate the two hundred
fifty ath the anniversary this year, and most of our
struggle as a country is trying to live up to
the ideals. And you remember in the preambly says, you know,

(12:03):
we hold these truth to be self evident, that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
creator with certain unalienable rights, and among those are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. The governments are instituted among
men to preserve those rights, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed. And I understand exactly your

(12:25):
point about mental capacity, but everyone has those fundamental rights,
and as the Secretary of State, I will defend those rights,
your rights and everyone else's to make sure that you
can vote. As a matter of fact, one of the
things I'm going to do is if people can't come
up and you're an American citizen and you're a resident
of the state of Ohio, you're over the age of eighteen,

(12:46):
but you can't find the documentation, I'm going to help you,
and we are going to create a brand new voter
advocacy department within the Secretary of State's office to make
sure that Ohioans are not disenfranchised and we're not going backwards,
but to make sure that those voter records are accurate
and that the people are American citizens and that they

(13:07):
qualify under our laws.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Got to get to the break. But I want to
give you credit for not saying the allment are you
know the thing that's progress, right, there his progress right there,
because the last time I heard that line over the airwaves,
it was Biden fumbling that so terribly that it was embarrassing.
Eight two one nine eight eighty six is the number
eight two one WTV, and I've already got a couple
hanging by that apparently have some questions for Robert's brague.

(13:30):
He would like to be your secretary of State. He's
joining us this hour.