Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from the law offices of Porter, Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at Porter Wright.com.

Porter Wright.

inspired every day.

And from the Ohio education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools every child deserves.

More at OHEA.org Senators approve allowing gun owners to sue cities if locally passed firearms laws are ruled unconstitutional.

And there's been frustration and fear over Secretary of State Frank Larose decision to send voter information to the DOJ.

I asked him about that and more this weekend.

The state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Castle.

Ohioans would be able to sue local governments to cover their legal fees if they fight those municipalities over locally passed gun ordinances that are rejected as unconstitutional.

In a bill that passed the Senate this week.

The chamber split along party lines in passing the measure, which supporters say puts the financial burden on cities and not gun owners who sue.

And Senate President Robert McCauley says it gives gun owners more power to protect their Second Amendment rights.

this is not a violation of home rule.

Home rule is still alive in the state of Ohio.

What this is meant to protect is an individual who is exercising their Second Amendment rights lawfully, from having to stand up and go to court to enforce their Second Amendment rights against an overzealous municipality who has passed a law against the United States and the Ohio Constitution.

But Minority Leader Nikki Antonio isn't buying that.

I love the question, what happened to Home Rule?

Does it still exist in Ohio?

It's a good question.

I think as well.

I obviously all the Democrats voted no on this bill because I do think that home rule is important.

It should be important to all of us.

I don't think that people's suc amendment rights in the state of Ohio under any kind of risk, that this bill will help with that.

I think it was another case of a solution looking for a problem.

I think it was an opportunity for my colleagues across the aisle to stand firm before the primary election and be able to say that they supported Second Amendment rights in the state of Ohio.

I don't think it solved any problem, and I think it could be problematic for municipalities.

The bill now goes on to the house.

A ban on synthetically modified versions of the Asian botanical herb, kratom will take effect May 14th, replacing a temporary ban that was set to expire in June.

The Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review approved the permanent ban on synthetic kratom, which is not regulated but is marketed as a dietary supplement and sold at specialty shops, convenience stores and gas stations.

Supporters of natural kratom say it treats pain and increases focus and energy with few side effects.

But the state says at least 200 Ohioans died from kratom between 2019 and 2024.

Lawmakers are also looking at bill, which would ban synthetic kratom and sales of natural kratom to minors.

Many Ohio parents and taxpayers have a new tool from the state to track a key metric in schools attendance.

It's not mandatory for districts to submit student counts to the new attendance dashboard, which governor Mike DeWine announced in his state of the state speech.

But state leaders are hoping schools will want to use it to deal with chronic absenteeism, which averages about 1 in 4 students statewide and is higher in larger urban districts.

More than 59% of students in Lorain City schools are chronically absent.

55.7% in Cleveland, 52.6% in Columbus and 45.6% in Cincinnati, according to their state report cards.

for the first time.

We'll have a tendency data updated weekly.

Previously, this information was only released with state report cards each fall, long after any of the problems could be addressed.

Now, communities won't have to wait months to understand what's happening inside their schools.

This new public school tool, this new tool shows chronic absence statewide.

And it does it by district.

It does it by school, and it does it down to the actual grade level.

So it's information that is usable.

It's information that's timely.

It's information that's important.

The dashboard will help schools understand attendance patterns and intervene early if needed.

It will also help the community understand what's going on.

we have about 24% of our districts in schools who have not yet participated in sharing their data.

There's a whole lot of reasons for that.

And we're working actually with a lot of those districts.

We do not have a unified data system in our state.

So one of the challenges that we have is there are different data systems that has to talk to this system.

And so we're working through with many of our districts on that much, much of this, many of these 24% districts, we are working to actively working with them to solve and resolve those technical problems that they're that they're having.

The more data we have, the better and more robustness system is.

The dashboard is at attendance.

Ohio gov.

when the Trump administration asked for voter registration data from states.

12 of them turned it over.

That doesn't include Ohio, and that launched a firestorm of criticism.

Ohio Democratic Party chair Kathleen Clyde called it an egregious abuse of power.

Representative Allison Russo, who is running for the Democratic nomination for secretary of state against Cincinnati Doctor Brian Hamley, said she has grave concerns about the information being manipulated and has filed a public records request with Secretary of State Frank Lara's office.

Trump's Department of Justice is suing 29 states for refusing to hand over the information, and that group includes blue and red states.

Larose has defended his decision to provide the data.

I asked him about it in his first interview since returning home from a six week activation for duty with the Ohio Army National Guard.

back.

You just got back to your office following your activation.

What can you share about what you just went through?

Well, first of all, I'm just one of many thousands of Ohioans who serve in the National Guard or as a reservist.

I was honored to have the opportunity to travel abroad with with my team and, and get some work done, really helping to increase the capacity of our allies to defend themselves.

This is one of the things that Green Berets do historically, is training foreign counterparts, building their capacity.

And so really had the honor of being able to do that.

And I'm just glad at 46 years old that I can still do Green Beret work.

And but, you know, the other nice thing was I was able because it's 20, 26, to stay very much in touch with the Secretary of State's office.

You were posting on social media.

I was and sort of came back every day and after my after my duty day with the Army was complete and I was working on emails and zoom meetings and that kind of thing, and still very much able to be in touch.

And of course, we've got a very capable team at the Secretary of State's office that didn't skip a beat.

We were able to continue doing the work that we did there, and I was able to make whatever major decisions had to be made and stay apprized of everything that was happening while I was gone.

Can you share where you were?

I was in Eastern Europe.

Yeah.

All right.

You made the decision to turn over to the Department of Justice.

Voter data files that include driver's license numbers, dates of birth, last four digits of Social Security numbers.

Your spokesman said the DOJ has the legal authority to get that data, that it's protected by federal privacy laws, and that opposition to the effort is politically motivated.

Ohio is one of 12 states that turned over that data.

Five states turned over only publicly available data.

And the Trump administration is suing 29 other states for not turning over the data.

A federal court dismissed the lawsuit seeking that data from Massachusetts.

So I want to ask you, did you have an opinion from the attorney general that said that the data needed to be turned over the DOJ?

Why did you do that?

So there are a number of different lawsuits that are all pending as it relates to that.

To me, it's very clear, though, it's always been a local estate and a federal responsibility to not only, you know, maintain the accuracy of voter rolls, but in some cases to, to to collaborate on that.

And of course, we work with our county Board of Elections that really are the boots on the ground doing elections administration on a daily basis.

And elections are run at the state level, no question about that.

It's a state responsibility to run elections.

But the federal law is very clear that the US attorney general has the right to look at voter rolls to make sure that states are following the law as it relates to that.

And and so, in some ways, there have been some of these politically motivated, I would call them stunts, even where these same people that were, that were okay with the state sharing voter registration data with non-governmental organizations.

Now all of a sudden have a problem with sharing that data with the federal government.

I'll remind folks that the federal government, that's the entity that that issues a social security number in the first place.

We're just talking about the last four that were shared with DOJ.

And really what we're what we're our stance is that we're proud of the work that Ohio's done on voter maintenance.

We take dead people off the voter rolls.

We make sure only citizens can be registered to vote.

I think that Ohio is really a model for other states.

And so we were happy to show our work to DOJ.

And as they scrutinize those voter rolls, what they're going to find is nothing's perfect, right?

But Ohio is doing a better job than probably any other state in the country.

You said that it's the state's responsibility to administer elections.

The DOJ had said it asked for this information to identify ineligible voters and order states to remove them.

So if elections are administered by states, why does the federal government have the authority to tell states who is eligible and who's not?

Well, it's in the National Voter Registration Act.

It's in the National Voting Rights Act.

I mean, these are laws that have been passed over the years as it relates to federal elections.

Right.

So we're talking about congressional elections, U.S.

Senate elections, presidential elections.

Of course, the federal government has an interest in making sure that states are doing their jobs correctly.

And whenever we can get data that shows us that we need to make adjustments to the system that we have, we're open to that.

Again, we do a really good job.

We get data from the state through the Department of Public Safety, the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

We use that to remove deceased voters.

We get information from the federal government through the Department of Homeland Security, what they call the Save database.

And so we get data from even things like the Postal Service's National Change of Address database.

We gather data from a lot of different sources to make sure that we maintain the accuracy of our voter rolls.

We're proud of that work.

And again, an example for the rest of the country to follow.

And you're confident that the information you turned over to the federal government will be protected.

It won't be used for nefarious purposes or sold off or whatever.

I mean, listen, the federal government has data privacy and protection statutes that are that are very solid.

Any federal employee that violated those would face all kinds of very severe, severe sanctions for doing that.

Again, I think we know that the federal government is in is the custodian of a lot of sensitive information, and they have their policies and procedures in place to make sure that that information is President Trump has said that he wants to ban no excuse absentee voting by mail.

We've been voting by mail.

No excuse absentee voting by mail since 2005.

LSC says 2.6 million Ohioans voted absentee or early in person in 2024.

That was 45% of votes cast, and of that 45%, 31% returned ballots by mail.

Wouldn't a ban on no excuse absentee mail in voting be a bad thing for a significant number of Ohioans, and for voter turnout in general?

I'm supportive of the statute that we have in place in Ohio.

If the federal government wants to take action on this, that would have to go through Congress and that kind of thing, and we'll see what happens and be ready to respond to that.

But listen, I myself have been an absentee voter.

Just recently.

I was an overseas absentee voter.

I cast my ballot through the overseas military process for this.

You know, the upcoming spring primary that's coming up on May 4th.

And overseas and military voters are always protected under these laws.

Absolutely.

Now, again, the concerns that I have are states that have universal Mail-In voting where everyone is mailed a ballot.

Even if they didn't request one, we would never do it that way in Ohio.

In Ohio, you have to request your ballot.

You have to prove your identity when you request your ballot, and then you have to prove your identity again when you mail it back in.

There's always ways to improve that situation.

There certainly are some vulnerabilities that exist with that.

But the statute that Ohio has in place has been working now for for many decades, and that's what we're going to continue to follow.

I'm bound to follow our state laws.

And of course, we make it convenient to vote absentee and Ohio and make sure that we safeguard the process, including with things like ballot tracking if you request an absentee ballot and if that's the way you want to vote, there's three great choices.

You can vote early in person, you can vote absentee by mail, or you can vote in person on Election Day.

If you want to request an absentee ballot, now is the time.

Go to vote.

Gov.

Print off the form.

Mail it in.

The deadline comes up on April 28th.

That's the cutoff to request an absentee ballot.

But you can track that ballot like you would track a package you order online.

You can go to Ohio Gov track.

You can see when the request has been received.

You can see when it's been fulfilled.

You know, the ballots on the way to your house.

And you can see when when it's been received back by the Board of elections.

Again a good process that we have in place in Ohio.

I'm supportive of what we have in Ohio.

And really other states should follow our method.

The concerns are these states that just mail out ballots to everybody, even people that didn't request one with no proof of identity.

And that's a problematic system in my mind.

Online voter registration.

Ohioans can do that.

And that's raised some concern for President Trump and others.

Is online voter registration something that you continue to support?

I was the sponsor of that bill when I served in the state Senate to create the system for online voter registration.

The vast majority of people that register to vote in Ohio now don't use the paper form, although that's still available to you.

Most people go to our website.

Ohio gov, including for updating your address.

If you've moved recently, or maybe gotten married and changed your name, you got to update your information.

You can use Ohio Gov to do that.

It's a secure process that Ohio has in place and it's a good process.

Speaking of changing names, you have said the Save America Act, which is under consideration in the US Senate, would set minimum standards for voter ID and citizenship verification to ensure election integrity.

Some Ohioans are concerned they don't have the proper ID if that became law, and there are questions about many married women whose names do not match the name on their birth certificate.

If they don't have passports, are they going to be able to vote?

So what can you assure people?

It's actually a bit of, you know, fear mongering out there by people with their own political motivations behind that?

It's a it's a well accepted process for when somebody changes their name because of a marriage or any other reason.

You update your information with the Ohio BMV for your driver's license.

You can do the same for registering to vote.

Again, it's a it's not a real concern.

The process that is in place in Ohio is is convenient and Ohioans know that.

Is it worth the risk, though, to worry Ohio women, for instance, who are married, whose names don't match their birth certificates or or in any way to change these laws to stop what is essentially not happening, which is illegal, non-citizens voting.

So voter voter fraud does occur.

It occurs in very small numbers, and it can have a big impact.

I think you've seen this every year we send out a release talking about how many elections were determined by a single vote or a tie vote.

We have tied votes in elections and elections in Ohio.

It happens a dozen times a year or more.

And it's not presidential or U.S.

Senate elections or governors elections.

It comes down to really important local elections, though, like school boards and city council races and local judge races.

And so one fraudulent vote is one too many.

We have safeguards in place in Ohio that really are a national model.

All the Save act does.

The Save America Act does is takes the good processes that we have in place in Ohio and applies them in other states.

And so it really those acts, both of them and I worked with the House Committee on Administration.

I've testified in front of that committee on a number of occasions that those bills were based on what Ohio already does.

They wouldn't really change much at all about the way Ohio votes.

It would take Ohio's good model and apply them to other states.

This is why Ohio's US Senator John Huston, a former secretary of state himself, has been one of the major proponents for these changes because it's already based on what Ohio does and taking those good models that Ohio has in place to other states.

But isn't the concern about noncitizens voting way overblown?

I wouldn't call it overblown.

It happens.

We found, you know, in cases where we've verified citizenship, many hundreds of examples of non-citizens, those are over decades potentially.

Sure.

Yeah, absolutely.

And again, we're not going to turn a blind eye to that form of voter fraud.

Listen, I use this example.

Airplane hijackings are incredibly rare.

But that doesn't mean you abolish TSA.

The fact that these things are rare in states like Ohio means that the safeguards that we have in place are working.

And so if somebody attempts to register to vote as a non-citizen, we will find them.

We will remove them from the voter rolls and in some cases refer them for prosecution.

It happens on the order of hundreds of times, not thousands or tens of thousands of times, but it can have serious consequences.

And Ohioans need to know, and Ohioans do know that their elections are secure.

People in other states should have the same, same safeguards in place that we have.

This came up as an ad from your office on X this morning.

Ohio consistently achieves a 99.9% accuracy rate in post-election audits following each election.

We've heard differently from the four people who are running for Secretary of State to succeed you.

I think that's expected by the Democrats that they have some concerns about and criticisms of you.

But do you feel like Republicans Robert Sprague and Marcel are criticizing your performance in office?

Not really.

I tell you what.

Clearly, in my personal capacity, I've chosen to endorse Treasurer Sprague.

I think he's the right choice to be the next secretary of state.

I think what he will do is take the good work that we've done and and, you know, carry that forward and maybe even take things to the next level.

We're proud of the fact that we do have highly accurate and honest elections in Ohio, as you've seen in that PSA that we released.

When we do post-election audits, we have a 99.9% accuracy rate historically.

That's because we count the hard copy paper.

And let me let me be clear about something.

In Ohio, every ballot is on paper, without exception.

We count the hard copy paper, we compare it to the electronic result.

And what we find is a highly accurate process that Ohioans can feel good about.

And that's what we should have.

Right?

Because that idea, to me starts from seventh grade civics lesson the consent of the governed, right.

This is including in the founding ideals of our country, that the only power that any government official has comes from the consent of the governed.

And that means that that consent is only given through a trustworthy election.

We need to run elections so well that people know that they are accurate and honest, in a true reflection of the will of the people.

That's what we do in Ohio.

Again, I would put our state up as a model for for other states to emulate.

And that's why things like the Save act are necessary to to bring Ohio's good model to the rest of the country.

Naturally, when people are running for this office, they're going to have their own ideas of things.

I must have made this office look like a lot of fun, because there's like four people running to replace me, and that's good.

It's a healthy contest of ideas that happens on a campaign trail, and that's playing out right now as both parties get to choose who their candidates are going to be in in the general election.

And of course, this November will decide who gets to who gets to take over after me.

You mentioned paper ballots, and that's something that's come up in this race between Sprague and Sturbridge.

They both say Ohio needs to move away from 100% electronic voting machines.

So there can always be paper ballots to audit, but there are paper ballots to audit.

It's a it's a law that says there has to be a voter verified paper trail on every voting machine.

And I think where the distinction comes in is that there are some that and I think this is foolish that want to go to hand counted paper ballots.

Now, if you hand count your ballots, you're not going to know the winner until, I don't know, Thanksgiving several weeks after the election.

That's not going to be satisfactory to the people of Ohio.

We have a multifaceted process right now where we use voting machines to count those results so that we get those on election night because we want that, and then we go back a few weeks later and count the paper to make sure that the electronic count was right.

That's actually a safeguard.

If you went to exclusively hand counted paper ballots, you'd be essentially taking away one of those redundancies that exist right now.

And anybody that thinks that you can't cheat with hand counted paper ballots needs to only look to recent history in the United States.

I mean, Chicago in the 1960s or whatever else.

Of course, when there's humans involved, there are opportunities for people to do the wrong thing.

And so that redundancy is important.

Electronic count gives you that really rapid and really accurate result on election night.

The hand count that we do as a post-election audit verifies that the machines counted correctly.

And that's important.

And indeed, we've even heard some people talk about legislation that would require results on election night, which can be very difficult to have.

I mean, we we already have that in Ohio.

We stay stay up late on election night usually.

And it follows a very predictable pattern.

By ten, 1030 on election night, we've usually gotten to 90 or so percent counted.

Most of the media outlets at that point have called races.

That's not an official thing.

But they say, hey, look, we see where this is going, and we're going to call the race on behalf of this winter or that.

And then usually it takes us until 2 or 3 a.m.

the next day, the Wednesday after the election.

But that's when we get everything finally counted.

Every ballot that was received by Election Day is counted on Election day.

And then, of course, in the in the days after, that's when they resolve those provisional ballots, those trailing absentees that come in.

And as you know, as a result of a recent law change, all absentee ballots have to be in by election day, 730, when the polls close, with the exception of those votes, those those overseas and military votes.

And again, that's a, I think, a laudable change that puts Ohio in alignment with the majority of other states.

I think 30 plus states around the country simply require their absentee ballots to be in by Election Day.

That's now the law in Ohio.

So again, don't procrastinate.

If you've requested an absentee ballot, you've got to get it to the Board of Elections by the close of polls on election night.

Obviously, you're a politician.

You ran for office.

You're running for office again.

But would it be beneficial if the Secretary of State's office were less political?

Oh, I don't know.

I think that for, you know, 200 plus years of our state's history, we've elected a member of of a political party to serve as the secretary of state.

And there's a human aspect of this.

It is incumbent on that person to discharge their duties in a nonpartisan way in certain regards.

If you look at the tie vote decisions that I've made as secretary of state, there's times that I have sided with the Democrat members of a county board of elections.

There's times that I've sided with the Republican members of the Board of elections, but in all cases, we've sided with simply what the law says.

So in that sense, I wear the referee's jersey, I call the balls and strikes.

But at the same time, the people of Ohio overwhelmingly, and I'm proud of the fact that I got a record number of votes when I was reelected to this office.

They've chosen that.

They want a conservative Republican to be their secretary of state.

And so, of course, I'm going to also discharge my duties in that way.

And the policies that I support, the bills that I support in the state legislature, that's the will of the people playing out.

When they chose a Republican to serve as secretary of state.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the state House News Bureau of Ohio Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State News or find us online by searching State of Ohio Show.

Stay in the know by registering for Ohio State House alerts through this QR code, or by texting state news to this number.

You can also hear more from us on our podcasts.

The Ohio State House scoop every Monday morning, and please join us again next time for the Stat Ohio.

Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from the law offices of Porter, Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at Porter Wright.com.

Porter Wright.

inspired every day.

And from the Ohio education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools every child deserves.

More at OHEA.org