Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose is all for improving election administration procedures across the country and protecting the right to vote. But he rejects arguments that the massive election overhaul of H.R. 1 is the voting rights bastion Democrats make it out to be.
Many provisions in H.R. 1, also called the For the People Act, are “not about protecting any fundamental rights,” LaRose told the Washington Examiner in an interview. Instead, Democrats are “just micromanaging certain tactics and techniques for how elections are to be run.”
The bill passed the House without any Republican support earlier this month and was introduced in the Senate this week. It has spurred debate in the Democratic caucus about whether and how to get rid of the filibuster in order to pass the bill, along with other Democratic priorities, through the evenly divided Senate.
As Democrats warn of state-level “voter suppression” efforts across the country, such as expanding voter ID laws, Republican outrage over last-minute voter system changes in 2020 and former President Donald Trump’s allegations of widespread voter fraud have made election integrity a top issue for grassroots Republicans.
“If you try to cram this square peg into the round hole, then what will result is chaos and confusion,” LaRose said. “That harms voter confidence, which is probably the most important thing that elections officials, Republican or Democrat, should be looking to protect.”
LaRose, who is also often mentioned as a potential Senate candidate in the open 2022 race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman, is uniquely positioned to criticize H.R. 1 as the top elections official in Ohio.
Years of scrutiny over the state’s election systems have turned the elections in Ohio into a well-oiled machine, and there were no issues in the system that brought national attention. Democrats point to a Brennan Center list of more than 200 state bills that they say will restrict voting rights, but none of those are in Ohio.
In fact, “there are a couple things in there that … seem to be fine ideas to me,” LaRose said of H.R. 1.
Ohio has online voter registration, which came from a bill that LaRose sponsored when he was in the state Senate, and the state also has early and absentee voting.
“I think all those are good things. Other states should take a good look at it,” LaRose said. He approves of sharing ideas through the Republican Secretaries of State Committee, in which he is active. Last month, the Republican State Leadership Committee, which focuses on GOP legislators and secretaries of state, launched a commission to study reforms that “make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
But “even if it was a one-page bill that just said all states must run their elections just like Ohio does, I would still oppose it because that’s not the proper role for the federal government to mandate that,” LaRose said, adding that H.R. 1 “goes way beyond” election administration reforms.
The bill would legalize “ballot harvesting,” the practice of allowing a person other than the voter, which could include political operatives, to return an absentee ballot, though H.R. 1 specifies that those returning ballots cannot be paid based on the number of ballots returned. One of the biggest changes in the bill is the creation of a public campaign finance system, and H.R. 1 includes an endorsement of statehood for Washington, D.C.
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It would turn the Federal Election Commission into a “partisan body,” LaRose said, by reducing the number of members on the commission from six to five, setting the stage for partisan decisions on the enforcement of election laws.
“It’s important to understand the big difference between H.R. 1 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” LaRose said. “What the federal government stepped in and did in 1965 was necessary to protect fundamental rights. But what the Voting Rights Act did not do is micromanage and tell the states how to run elections with the level of specificity of, ‘You must do this. You must have this many of this kind of days or this many boxes of a certain kind.'”
