Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal, ohiocapitaljournal.com When Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s latest effort to prosecute voter fraud last week showed once again that voter fraud is vanishingly rare in the Buckeye State — turning up a handful of indictments out of hundreds of case recommendations, representing a minuscule percentage of the millions upon millions of votes cast in recent Ohio elections — he called it a “bogus narrative” on social media. He’s used that accusation before. In February 2022, the news organization The Hill published a story that accurately said LaRose’s office found possible instances of voter fraud in 0.0005 percent of ballots cast in the 2020 election. LaRose took to the social media site that was then Twitter to accuse the media of pedaling a false narrative — and to support former President Donald Trump’s lies about that election: “Here they go again,” LaRose tweeted. “Mainstream media trying to minimize voter fraud to suit their narrative.” In a follow-up tweet, LaRose added, “President Trump is right to say voter fraud is a serious problem. More to come.” Trump’s claims of voter fraud were rejected by 60 courts, Fox News had to pay out $787 million over false stories about vote rigging, and Trump incited a mob to attack Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 over bogus claims of a rigged election. However, true to his word, LaRose has continued to beat the voter-fraud drum. “It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the integrity of Ohio’s elections is under attack!” he posted on X Friday as he continues to demand citizenship records from the federal government. But over the past six years, LaRose has failed to make the case that significant levels of voter fraud are happening in Ohio. Frustrated that county prosecutors weren’t doing more to pursue what his office thought might be cases of fraud, LaRose in September referred more than 600 to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost. He made the referral after local prosecutors took up just 12 of the 633 cases he had referred to them. On Tuesday, Yost announced the result: Just six indictments after a Lorain County grand jury declined to charge an Oberlin College student. And one of those who were indicted turned out to be dead. The indictments address voting in elections stretching back to 2008. In presidential contests alone, more than 22 million Ohioans have voted since then, so 18 voter fraud charges show that despite LaRose’s aggressive investigation, phony voting just isn’t happening very much. In announcing the charges, Yost said voter fraud was rare, and he took LaRose to task over the quality of some of his referrals. “I need to have a sit-down with the secretary of state about the value of those cases where there was no voting — I think that we ought to be focusing on the voting,” Yost said. But that didn’t stop LaRose from claiming there’s actually a lot of voter fraud in Ohio. “Also look for this bogus narrative: ‘It’s only six out of millions! Election fraud doesn’t exist!'” LaRose said last Tuesday on the social media site that is now called X. “That’s a spurious tactic by leftist operatives and their media allies who either want to ignore clear instances of fraud or outright want to make it easier to cheat.” The secretary of state’s office didn’t respond when asked how it could be a “bogus narrative” when it was literally true that Yost’s work resulted in just six indictments out of tens of millions of votes cast. Meanwhile, LaRose and his Republican allies on Capital Square have used the specter of widespread voter fraud to undertake a number of measures that critics say disenfranchise people who tend to vote Democratic: • A voter ID law enacted last year that is estimated to have already blocked more than 8,000 from voting. • Tough restrictions on boxes for voters to drop off absentee ballots. LaRose had already limited the number of such boxes to one per county — regardless whether it has a million residents and tends to vote blue, or just 13,000 and tends to vote red. • Despite the extreme rarity of voter fraud, LaRose also wants to require proof of citizenship in order for people to register. He’s now being sued over those actions. As with voter ID requirements, citizens who lack such documents tend to belong to groups such as people of color who tend to vote for LaRose’s political opponents. • LaRose also has purged hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls, including many because they haven’t cast ballots consistently. Critics say there’s no constitutional requirement that voters must be consistent to be eligible. In addition to his claims about voter fraud, LaRose has done and said a number of other misleading things concerning elections and voting in Ohio. For example, last year as he led the drive to make it much more difficult for voters to initiate amendments to the state Constitution, LaRose claimed the effort had nothing to do with blocking an abortion-rights amendment that passed by 14 last November or an anti-gerrymandering amendment that’s on the ballot next week. But then he told a group of Seneca County Republicans that the effort was “100-percent about” blocking the abortion-rights amendment. As secretary of state, LaRose heads up the Ohio Ballot Board. That entity this year wrote a ballot summary of the anti-gerrymandering amendment that is on next week’s ballot that critics say is highly misleading. Even though Ohio’s legislature and congressional delegation are among the most gerrymandered, LaRose’s ballot summary said the proposed reforms would “establish a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio.” Marty Schladen has been a reporter for decades, working in Indiana, Texas and other places before returning to his native Ohio to work at The Columbus Dispatch in 2017. He's won state and national journalism awards for investigations into utility regulation, public corruption, the environment, prescription drug spending and other matters. 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