Support for the state House news bureau comes from medical mutual dedicated to the health and well-being of Ohioans offering health insurance plans, as well as dental vision and wellness programs to help people achieve their goals and remain healthy.

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The Law Offices of Porter Wright Morrison, Arthur LLP.

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

More at Porter right Rt.com Porter Wright inspired every day 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, The light hearted lunacy around the eclipse climbs higher as the big day is on the horizon.

Though safety officials are taking things seriously and more on Election Day to comes in and goes out with the chief of Ohio's election system.

That's this week on the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of ohio.

I'm karen kasler.

Eclipse excitement is reaching its apex on the way to the big event on monday when about 124 miles of western and northern ohio will be in total darkness for as long as almost 4 minutes when the moon will appear to completely cover the sun.

The total solar eclipse is Ohio's first since 1806, when the state was three years old.

There won't be another one visible in Ohio until 2099.

The reception to this once in a lifetime event has been huge.

Hotel rooms and restaurants across Ohio are booked.

State parks are sold out.

School districts have canceled classes and tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of vehicles could jam city streets, highways and state routes.

Communities in the path of totality have been preparing for more than a year.

The eclipse is one of a series of big events in Cleveland.

The NCAA women's basketball championship is 24 hours before the eclipse, and a sold out home opener for the Cleveland Guardians starts a little over half an hour after it.

Cuyahoga County emergency and safety experts say it's not going to be a normal day.

As you can imagine, in the county like ours.

There's a lot of different police and fire departments and service departments and all sorts of entities that have to be connected and communicating during our special event.

So a lot of a lot of our work is focused on ensuring that coordination is going to exist.

Did you consult with other big cities that have hosted something like this where there's certain events that have happened in Cleveland that have helped you figure out what you want to do?

Yes.

You know, we were fortunate that the city of Nashville experienced a very similar event in 2017.

And there are obviously a comparably sized urban area to ours.

And so they were able to share some of their lessons learned and experiences from the event.

Primarily, you know, what they what they focused on was that they likened it to hosting a large special event like the NFL draft or or another type of event that you've been accustomed to seeing in the Cleveland area.

And, you know, they talked to us about some of the traffic congestion issues that they experience that you would expect that of a large special event with a you know, a large volume of people coming to an area.

They also talked about momentary communications issues, sometimes in areas hit pockets of, you know, densely populated pockets of people, which again, is something that that we're accustomed to here.

You know, you go to a Browns game or or the Cavs championship parade in 2016.

People are familiar with that occasionally occurring.

Are you preparing for just a lot of traffic and crowds or is there a real concern about emergencies that could happen when you bring a large number of people together all at once?

I mean, our focus, I think, is mostly on the traffic and crowds.

We're trying to ensure that the areas that are hosting watch parties are equipped and able to, you know, share information.

We have good visibility on what's occurring there.

And then in the event that, you know, there would be an issue that would potentially happen somewhere, that again, we're going to have our emergency operations center activated.

We've gone through our planning process.

So, you know, over the course of this year, we have all of our stakeholders and partners plugged into that.

And, you know, we feel confident that we're able to react to that.

You know, if there is a traffic issue or some other disruption, we'll be able to react to that and and respond the way we need to.

80%, 90% of emergency management's job is before the emergency or before the event and planning for it and preparing.

And so we've been doing this a long time, trying to mitigate the risk or what could happen that day.

We all hope that nothing is going to happen that day.

But what people may not realize is there's a there's a whole room operating in the background.

The day of of the eclipse.

And it's as Mark mentioned, it's all of our stakeholders and all of us trying to make sure that public safety is as prepared as is possible, but that we've and we've been doing the work.

But if there is an emergency that we can work together and we can quickly mitigate that emergency.

And finally, I know the weather is the wildcard here that we haven't even talked about.

It's it's hard to predict the weather in Ohio in April.

I guess final advice here.

If people want to go to a specific site, say Great Lakes Science Center, Edgewater Park, how should they plan to get there and how early?

Well, I think, yeah, you have to I would encourage people to watch the news, watch the traffic, you know, all the all the different apps and Google maps you have now will show you a pretty, you know, reliably well information on traffic conditions.

And so, you know, if you're if you're going to if you're planning to go to a certain area that is hosting a watch party, I'd recommend reaching out to that area.

As far as whatever the community is in, your local stakeholders are going to have the best information about potential road closures and other issues to avoid that day.

So I just think informing yourself as best you can about, you know, if there's an end point, if there's a location that you're you're going to try to get to, you know, thinking through the route you're going to take to get there and making sure that you have the best information from that location about what to expect.

Day of.

And what's your weather prediction here?

I mean, if you're a bridge and you're watching the weather pretty carefully, as a lot of people who are hoping to experience this eclipse, are you?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And so, you know, as I mentioned, you know, the stakeholders, one of those is the National Weather Service, and they're already providing regular forecast updates for the actual, you know, April 8th date.

The last one that I saw, you know, that talked to, you know, had a lower percentage of precipitation expected.

But there are some cloud cover expected.

They you know, they caveat that with this could change, you know, obviously ten more times leading up to the event.

So who knows?

I think, you know, the day off is going to be the best indicator as to what the weather is going to look like.

Brandi, want to add anything?

I would just add that making sure, in addition to her personal preparedness that people remember, see something, say something, you know, look around.

There's a lot of people and the majority of people have best intentions for an event like this.

But if something doesn't look right, you know, say something to a law enforcement officer or someone else, like especially for if a teenager or a kid making sure that that they find an adult or someone that they can talk to.

One of the things the sheriff always likes to tell the little kids or the family is when you're going out for that day, since there are large events, put your phone number on your child's arm in case they are to get lost or away from you.

So we want to make sure none of those things happen, but just remember that they could.

And so that personal preparedness is, again, so important.

Officials are also reminding drivers that it's not safe to stop on freeways to see the eclipse.

There are problems with drivers doing that during the last total solar eclipse in the US in 2017.

Around 42 hours after the end of the eclipse.

Governor Mike DeWine will deliver his State of the State speech after agreeing on the date with legislative leaders at announcing it on Wednesday.

We'll have highlights and reaction on next week's show.

With the primary in the rearview mirror.

Ohioans can look forward to voting again in just over 200 days, though there is a special election in the sixth Congressional District in June to replace Republican Bill Johnson, who's now the president at Youngstown State University, over the protests of student groups.

Some high profile alumni and faculty.

Last week, my statehouse news bureau colleague, Joe Ingles, spoke with Lorain County Board of Elections Director Paul Adams, a Democrat, and the incoming leader of the Ohio Association of Elections Officials, about voting data, especially on election night.

This week, she talked with the Republican in charge of the state's elections in all 88 counties.

Secretary of State Frank LaRose on election night.

We were watching the results come in on the secretary of state's website and national networks called the race before we even started seeing numbers really coming in.

What do they know that we don't know?

Well, I think a lot of times that's a result of exit polling that they do.

They'll ask people as they walk out of their polling location to voluntarily disclose who they voted for.

Of course, the voter can tell them none of your business and walk on past.

But I think that a lot of times is based on that.

I'm not a big fan of that, by the way.

I mean, we work really hard to get those results first accurately, but also quickly.

We'll never sacrifice this accuracy for speed, but we also work very quickly.

So you see results at 745, 8:00, 830 on election night.

Those are all those early votes and absentee votes, which are intuitively already there at the Board of elections, ready to count, ready to release.

And so we get those out quickly.

By 830, 9:00, we're releasing those election Day numbers.

And so Ohioans get those numbers very quickly.

You can make a determination about whether those numbers are conclusive or not on your own.

I know members of the media do that.

We usually are at about 90% by 11.

90% of those votes have been tabulated and released.

It usually takes us until two or three in the morning to get that final 10%.

Those are where maybe they had to run the count again because of an error made by the Board of Elections or whatever else.

And so it goes until the wee hours for us.

But we don't go to bed on election night, and neither do our boards of elections until 100% of the ballots that are in that day.

So excluding provisional polls or the absentees that are still coming in, maybe from overseas military.

But everything that we have on Election Day gets reported on election night.

We're proud of that.

So local boards of elections, well, they have the outcomes at the precincts and they post them on the doors or the windows.

They bring the ballots to the county boards of elections where they're counted again.

Why aren't those precinct totals immediately reflected on the secretary of state's website?

Well, that's something that will be able to start doing in the future.

One of the things that we were able to get done, working with the legislature, working with a group called the America First Policy Institute, is a thing called the Data Act, which is going to make Ohio really once again a leader in the nation with the transparency of our election data.

Right now, those numbers tend to get aggregated at the county Board of Elections and then we report them out in aggregate.

But we'll be able to start reporting at a much more granular level once the Data Act is fully implemented, which is something that we're looking forward to.

And so when's that going to happen?

Well, I think the effective date is late this year, although we're working to bring some of that online in advance of the November election and won't be fully implemented.

There are a lot of technological changes that we need to make to get that done.

And again, we're never going to sacrifice accuracy for speed.

So we're going to work through that very diligently, but we're required to have it all in place, I think, by the end of this year or early part of next year.

And that would take those precinct totals and get them into the count faster so people could see it.

Not only that, but a lot of other more granular data about how elections work.

I've always said that there's nothing to hide at a board of elections.

It's an open book.

We collect a lot of different pieces of data.

Sometimes the only way to access that right now is by doing a public records request to the Board of Elections.

That can be an 88 county process.

In some cases, we even have to request it from the Board of Elections.

There's no sort of streamlined, automated way for us to get that more granular data with the data act in place.

We're going to have not only for the sort of power users like journalists and academics, people that are sort of data scientists that want to get into this, but also for the average person to be able to get more information about how elections work.

And part of this is telling the story of really how accurate and honest Ohio's elections are.

Unfortunately, there are people that believe a lot of things that just aren't true about elections, various conspiracies or whatever else.

And so being able to open the books and show more of the granular data about how elections work will also give you the opportunity to do an apples to apples comparison of different counties and that kind of thing as well.

There's some data that should be available on election night early from the early vote.

You know, for example, we should know, you know, maybe Partizan make up of those who voted early, maybe genders of people who voted early, ages of people who voted early.

That kind of data should be available.

Why don't we get that early?

Well, we don't gather demographic data about voters.

So when you register to vote, you know, we know your date of birth.

So I guess we could we could get that.

But we don't have gender or race or a variety of other things like that.

We get your name, your address, your your date of birth, and that's effectively it, your state driver's license number or the last four of your social your signature.

Those are the things that we get when we register someone to vote.

So there's only so much data that we have available on the demographics of the individuals in question.

And remember, we know who voted, but we don't know how they voted.

Right.

Which is the secrecy of the ballot that we require and want to have.

And so, you know, a lot of that gets depersonalized in the process of tabulating those results because we just get sort of the aggregate numbers and we'll never be able to track how individuals vote.

That's not something that we want.

That's why, for example, your absentee ballot goes in a secrecy envelope.

So even the elections officials that are tabulating that are not able to know how each individual voted.

We know some people question the integrity of an election and when they see those declarations coming out from national networks so early in the evening and they haven't seen totals that reflect that, it kind of feeds that that whole mentality of, hey, there's something wrong here.

You've got to admit that, right?

Well, this is why I've told you that I'm not a big fan of it.

But they are predictions, right, that the freedom of the press there's a reason why your profession is protected by the First Amendment.

They can predict if they want to.

They do that even before Election Day when they conduct polls and they they predict which way an election is going to go.

An early vote call like that, an early call by by a network or by a group of reporters to say, hey, this person is the winner.

It's just that it's a prediction.

It really doesn't matter until we get the final numbers out there, which is, you know, don't really come until three weeks after the election when we conduct the official canvass.

And those final totals which are about to come out here in the state of Ohio, the final official total is the one that really matters.

Election night is just people bracing to be the first one to call a race in many cases.

But there's also an important number that we started reporting when I became secretary of state.

And that's kind of the denominator we put on our website.

How many outstanding absentee ballots there are.

So on election night, you'll know if you look on our website, how many could still change right over the ensuing three weeks with provisional ballots, with outstanding absentees that are still expected to come in, that kind of thing.

And so if your favorite candidate won by 100,000 votes and there's only 80,000 outstanding ballots, will, you know, it's over.

But if your favorite candidate won by 10,000 votes and there are 80,000 outstanding, well, that's still too close to call.

And those could change in the in the final three weeks of of the official canvass.

So just a piece of data that we want to make sure that people are aware of.

Every election we see local boards of elections doing things differently.

Okay.

We have 88 boards of elections in Ohio.

Is that a problem?

I mean, I know you have you have training and they're all supposed to go through the same training, yet they do things differently.

What about.

That?

It's both a feature and a glitch or a feature and a bug, if you will.

I mean, it's the way that Ohio runs elections is very decentralized.

And what that means is that our 88 counties are pretty autonomous in how they operate each county board of elections is run by two Republicans and two Democrats.

They are appointed by me with the advice of the county Republican Party or the county Democratic Party.

And that's why, by the way, when you see your ballot, the signatures of those Board of Elections members are on every ballot.

Same reason an artist signs her painting or his painting is, you know, same reason why the Board of Elections members signatures are on the ballot because they're the ones responsible for the conduct of elections within the law of the state and the standards that I put out.

So the state law dictates what we do, of course, in the state constitution, as well as the rules that my office puts in place.

But then within that, there's room for variation for each county to do things administratively the way that that fits them.

Again, as much as I love being Ohio's chief elections officer, I don't really run elections.

It's run by 88 counties and they're local leaders under my supervision.

And that's one of the reasons why things work different in very small counties versus very large counties.

We try to standardize that as much as possible, but there's room for variation in that.

What's the status of the No Labels group?

I know they want it to be a third party.

Where does that stand right now?

Yeah.

So they gathered signatures.

There were a shortage of signatures in a few counties.

We've asked a few counties to take a second look at that to make sure that they followed the law appropriately.

You know, these things often end up in litigation, although we try to avoid that.

That kind of litigation, the sort of rush to the courthouse right before Election Day is a bad thing for elections administrators, for voters, for the confidence that people have in the process.

So we're working with a few of the county boards of elections to make sure that they did the count accurately.

And once that's done, they will certify that result to me and will be able to announce whether they were able to meet the threshold of of qualifying as what's called a minor party in Ohio.

They're the major parties Democrat and Republican.

And then Ohio's law allows for the establishment of minor parties.

Think of the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, this new group that wants to form.

They have the right to do that.

If they're able to gather enough signatures and we'll let you know whether they they were able to meet that threshold or not very soon.

Okay.

Ohio left the electronic registration Information center.

And as Eric left that over a year ago, as several Republican run states had also done that.

You praised Eric at one point as one of the best fraud fighting tools that we have yet.

Ohio left Eric, because leadership didn't because leadership of eric didn't implement certain changes that you wanted.

The eric database helped you find around 100 incidents of suspected non-citizens voting.

So what has replaced Eric and has that new system helped you identify instances of suspected voter fraud?

So I have a duty to the voters and the taxpayers of Ohio to make sure that if we're spending money on something, if we're working with something, that it's actually fulfilling its purpose.

And Eric started out well over a decade ago as a collaboration of states for sharing data, publicly available data in most cases, but sharing data to make sure that, for example, if someone registered to vote in another state, that we could then cancel their registration or begin the process of canceling the registration here, or if someone tried to commit the form of election fraud of multistate voting, if they tried to vote in Ohio and vote in in another state, we could catch them doing that.

I've referred several hundred actually to law enforcement that we've caught doing that.

The problem with Eric is that over time it had become very unaccountable.

And I actually had a member of my team join the executive board to try to bring about a whole list of reforms.

And it wasn't just me, it was other secretaries of state around the country that had the same concerns.

We asked them to do data transparency, audits, a data integrity audits.

They refused.

We asked them to do financial audits.

They refused.

We tried to get them to remove a couple of pretty harsh partizans that had ex-officio board seats and at the same time were going on cable news programs and trashing one party exclusively and not the other party.

And that was concerning.

This group should be kind of above that, that kind of thing when, after a year of trying to reform Eric, the group refused those those really pretty common sense reforms then myself and some other secretary said, okay, we're not going to be part of an organization that is increasing its cost every year.

Right?

We have to pay to be a member of that.

But refusing these these kind of basic transparency reforms that we had asked for and what we've done is replaced it with something much more streamlined, which is a state to state data sharing arrangement that we have now with several other states where we've just entered into a memorandum of understanding where after the election we can make our data available to them, they can make their data available to us.

We can do a simple match to see, for example, if there are multiple people with the same first, middle and last name that voted in our state and in that state and the same date of birth, it's not proof positive that I guess it's statistically possible that there's someone with the same first middle last name and date of birth in both states, but at least it gives us the starting off point to do further investigation to find out if that is a multistate voter so that we can refer them for prosecution.

We can just do that on a state to state basis without having this sort of costly and unaccountable third party in the middle.

Meanwhile, some elected officials are already looking to, after the November vote, a showdown between House Speaker Jason Stephens and Senate President Matt Huffman for the speaker's gavel seems inevitable, with Huffman making his most direct comments yet about running for that position when he wins a House seat for which he is unopposed.

He made those comments right after the primary.

Stephens is also unopposed in his House race.

Well, you know, I think.

It is really interesting that we have you know, we still have nine months left.

Yeah, nine months almost left of this.

G.A.

the house has been working really hard.

We have done a lot of really good things.

And I think it would be frankly, it would be better if the Senate president would pay attention to running the Senate instead of trying to run the House.

That's really how I feel about that.

Stephens was elected on the House floor with the votes of 22 Republicans, while Derek Marin, who had been selected by the Republican caucus a few weeks earlier, got 43 Republican votes.

But it was the votes of all 32 House Democrats that vaulted Stephens to the win.

House Minority Leader Allison Rousso says all this is not surprising.

I think we're seeing politics at play.

I think we're seeing the ill effects of a supermajority of Republican supermajority.

You know, there are too many of them.

They're fighting themselves.

And at the end of the day, we've always said that supermajority isn't without having that balance in the legislature.

The price for that is paid by the people of Ohio in that, you know, we don't have a government that is responsive or productive.

Hoffman had said a few Democrats had reached out to him after the primary in which four Stevens supporters lost their races.

Russo said that was news to her.

And we close out the show remembering the worst tornado in Ohio history.

50 years ago this week, 335 people died in the super outbreak of 148 tornadoes in 13 states on April 3rd and fourth, 1974.

One of those killed 32 people in Xenia, leveling that community and nearby Wilberforce.

7000 homes were destroyed and it sparked federal, state and local agencies to expand tornado preparedness and communications and warning systems.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our Web site at State News dot org or find us online by searching the state of Ohio show.

You can also hear more from the bureau on our new podcast.

The Ohio State House scoop.

Look for it every Monday morning wherever you get your podcasts.

And please join us again next time for the state of Ohio.

Support for the Statehouse news bureau comes from medical mutual dedicated to the health and well-being of Ohioans offering health insurance plans as well as dental, vision and wellness programs to help people achieve their goals and remain healthy.

More at med mutual dot com The law offices of Porter Wright Morrison Arthur LLP.

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

More at Porter right.

Com Puerto Wright inspired every day 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.