The Daily Signal - BONUS | Biden 'Weaponizes' Feds to Boost Democratic Voter Turnout, Ohio Secretary of State Says

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the vice chairman of the Republican Secretaries of State Committee, explains why the GOP opposes a Biden executive order pushing for federal agencies to get involved in elections. on voter registration. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast. I'm Fred Lucas. Over the weekend, President Biden delivered a voting rights speech in Alabama as the White House touted his executive order to expand the government into voter participation. I talked to Ohio Secretary of State, Frank LaRose, about election integrity issues in his state and about the Biden executive order. I'll get to my conversation with Secretary LaRose from CPAC right after this. Today, news you can trust feels like a rarity. That's why the Daily Signal podcast releases a top news edition every weekday at 5 p.m. Whether driving home from work, fixing dinner, or picking the kids up from soccer practice, you can stay informed on the headlines you care about. Every show is quick and succinct, designed to keep you up to speed on the issues that actually matter. Catch our top news edition right here in your Daily Signal podcast feed. every evening or listen first thing in the morning before catching the day's interview.

And be sure to subscribe on the Daily Signal podcast so you never miss an episode. We're here at CPAC with Ohio Secretary of State Franklin Rose. And Secretary, could you tell us a little bit about the Ohio voter ID law that passed this year? It's gotten some controversial coverage in the mainstream media and just see if you could clear up some myths about that. Yeah, and quite a bit of hypocrisy from. the left, no surprise. You know, what Ohio has done for many decades is required a photo ID when you come to vote, but there was always a backup plan. You could show a utility bill. You could

show a pay stub. You could show a variety of different things that weren't as secure, right? Like you could fake one of those. And so what the state legislature did, thoughtfully, is pass a bill called Senate Bill 458, and that was passed last December, signed into law by our governor. And we learned from the way other states have implemented mandatory photo ID provisions over the years. And so I worked with the legislature to craft this. And what we did was make sure that it'll survive court challenge because there are many court challenges over the years to mandatory photo ID bills. So we included things like a religious exemption. We've got a large Amish population that doesn't believe in being photographed. So you can sign an affidavit or whatever else.

We also created a provision in the legislature that you can get a free ID. So there's no excuse if you are part of that very tiny percent of our population that doesn't already have a state ID or driver's license, you can get one absolutely free. And so it was well put together, thoughtfully done. And here's the other thing that here are the numbers, because we check with our boards of elections. We've got 88 county boards of elections, very decentralized system in Ohio. We asked them, how often do people show a photo ID before the law? And it was already 98% of Ohio. And only a 2% small fraction showed those alternative forms. And so we believe that, that most Ohioans, just like you and I, already carry a photo ID in their pocket.

This, despite all of the rhetoric and hyperbole from the left, is not anything that suppresses the vote. It simply increases the security of our process and creates more confidence, right? Because over 75% of Americans support photo ID. It's a common sense thing. You won't be surprised to know that immediately after this was passed, the left filed lawsuits, this, you know, shady partisan lawyer named Mark Elias, who you may have heard of, turned his sights on us and not only filed a lawsuit, but immediately started going on MSNBC and raising money off of it and what have you. But we're going to fight it. The Attorney General and I are well prepared to defend this in court, and I believe we'll win. Yeah, we have seen the Biden administration has weaponized

their DOJ against other states. Brad Riffensberg over in Georgia, your colleague, actually won a lawsuit recently against the DOJ for FOIA documents about how the DOJ has coordinated with various left-wing groups and their election lawsuit. Do you anticipate the Biden administration might come after Ohio? You know, I hope not, but I wouldn't be surprised. It's unfortunate because they've got an important job to do, and they should be focused on that job, but unfortunately, the elections section at DOJ is often populated with partisans who have an axe to grind and want to really carry on a political agenda from which.

within the halls of the Department of Justice. No surprise there. They haven't entered the lawsuit yet. I certainly hope they won't because they've got other fish to fry and they should focus on that. After the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress were unable to push through their federal election takeover bill, it's 2021, early 2022,

the president actually had an executive order that pushed federal agencies to be involved in boosting voter participation and so forth. It seemed like a pretty questionable role for actual federal agencies. Is Ohio looking at that? Is that something you're concerned about at all? Well, absolutely.

And as a group, the Republican Secretaries of State have been vocally opposing this. I currently serve as the vice chair of the Republican Secretaries of State Committee. Yeah, you're right. They were unsuccessful at passing what amounted to a massive federal takeover of elections. They called it HR1. They called it the For the People Act. And you know when the left names a bill, it probably does the opposite of elections. what they call it, right? So when they call it the For the People Act, it's probably not for the people.

And it's not unlike the Inflation Reduction Act, which doesn't really reduce inflation. It actually makes it worse. The For the People Act was not for any people. It was for bureaucrats and leftist operatives. And you're right, because we defeated that with a bipartisan vote in the U.S. Senate, the Biden administration has tried to use their executive authority to go around that. One of the really concerning things about this push from the Biden administration is the money that's flowing in a very unaccountable way to groups to do voter registration. Now, let me say, I'm the first to tell you voter registration is important. We work hard to get people registered to vote. We're proud of the fact that we've got just under 8 million registered voters in the state of Ohio.

And so we want any legal citizen who's over 18 and not an incarcerated felon, we want them to be registered to vote in Ohio. to sort of weaponize the federal government to really try to drive Democrat registration, and that's what they're focused on. That's problematic, and we're going to continue fighting it. Right. And there's still a lot of a real lack of transparency about what groups the federal government

is actually working with in terms of getting us out there. The left is crafty when it comes to getting money to flow to things. We've seen this with groups like Planned Parenthood that find backdoor ways of getting money, even though we've plugged those holes over, and over again. And it's not unlike this. They're shuffling federal money to unaccountable sources to do what they call voter registration. But I think in many cases, it's targeted towards democratic populations, which is, that's where it's problematic. Listen, voter registration's a good

thing. But when you're using federal resources or state resources for that matter to increase registration in a way that helps your party, that's problematic. And we need to call it out and shine a light on it. And I'm glad you're doing that. I know Ohio has been a sort of leader on election integrity issues. There was a 2018 Supreme Court case in terms of cleaning the voter rolls and so forth. What do you anticipate for Ohio going forward and what do you think Ken should be a model for states nationally? Yes, Ohio has become a national model for election integrity, but also convenience, right? It's a false choice that you have to choose between convenient or secure elections, right? You'll hear strident voices say, you know, if you're making it more secure,

you must be making it less convenient or whatever. That's not true. In Ohio, it is easy to vote. It's also hard to cheat. And that's something that we're proud of. And there's a reason for this. For 20 years, two decades, Ohio's been in the national spotlight.

Every time we have certainly a presidential election, the whole world is watching. And as a result of that, and by the way, as a result of smart conservative leadership, we've put things in place that make it easy to vote in Ohio. If you're not voting in Ohio, you've just decided it's not important to you. And that's unfortunate because it does really make a big difference.

But we also do smart things like, as you mentioned, maintaining accurate voter rules. This went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and my predecessor defended that, and I'm now carrying it out. In fact, just two weeks ago, we did another update of our voter rolls where we removed outdated data. The left uses scary words like purging, which sounds very ominous. All we're doing is removing duplicates, deceased, departed. I call it the three Ds, those that have moved out of state. We're moving bad data from removing bad data. out of the voter rolls. We also do an annual inspection of our voter rules to make sure that only

citizens are registered to vote. You've seen this foolishness in leftist cities like, well, right here in Washington, D.C., where they just passed this crazy resolution in their city council saying that anybody can vote regardless of citizenship status, meaning if you're an operative that's working at the Chinese embassy, now you're allowed to vote in D.C. elections, that's a crazy idea. Thankfully, they're fighting that in Congress. Congress. We don't allow that kind of nonsense in Ohio. And so we do an annual inspection of our roles to make sure that there are no non-citizens registered to vote. One of the other things that we do that I'm, you know, that I'm proud of is that we make sure that voters are empowered

with accurate information. There's a lot of false information out there, so we make sure that voters know. And finally, we enforce the law. I'm in an executive position, so it's my job to execute the laws passed by our General Assembly. One of the things I found when I came to this office is we didn't have any investigative capacity. The law says that it's my responsibility to investigate election fraud, but we didn't have investigators. So we've created a public integrity division, hired three retired law enforcement officers or former law enforcement officers that know how to build an evidence packet, follow the rules of evidence, subpoena documents, put witnesses under oath so that when we suspect somebody's committed election fraud, we can build that evidence and

hand it to a county prosecutor on a silver platter, say, take this into a courtroom and you're going to get a conviction because the conviction rate for election fraud I found was really low. We're solving that by having professional investigators really working to keep voter fraud rare. I know that in Ohio it's rare. We keep it rare by enforcing the law. And I've referred over 630 individuals to law enforcement during my term of Secretary of State. 630 individuals out of 8 million, small number, but they're going to face justice for it. And let the word go out. If you think you're going to get away with voter fraud in Ohio, you're not. We will catch you. And you will catch you. And you will face justice for doing so.

And in terms of the left smith about voter suppression, that's not come to fruition at all. Absolutely not. And even their own side doesn't buy it, right? So there was a poll done by not a conservative outlet. CBS News did a poll in 2020 right before the presidential election, and they asked a huge sample size, over 1,000, I believe, is it easy to vote in Ohio?

And among Republicans, the number was 92. that said it's easy to vote, but even among Democrats, it was 88% that said it's easy to vote. So this tired old left-wing talking point about Republicans wanting to suppress the vote, even Democrats know that's true. And here's the other thing. If my objective, as the Republican who holds the Office of Secretary of State, if my objective was to suppress the vote, I must be terrible at it. Of course, that's not my objective.

But we've had record turnout in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022. And by the way, in all of those cycles, when Ohioans showed up in massive numbers to vote in a secure election, Republicans won. And that's something that we can be proud of. We want to see high participation. We also just want it to be secure, and that's not too much to ask. And historically, with strong voter ID laws, voter turnout has increased. Absolutely. States like Georgia. You know, I was with the Georgia election official the other day, and he was saying how their voter participation after their new voter,

protection bill passed a couple years or a year ago, the level of participation has gone up, and he was commenting that, you know, the left called it Jim Crow 2.0. He said it's actually Jim Eagle. It's a patriotic thing because people of all different races and ethnicities, people of all different

walks of life are showing up still in massive numbers, and they're confident that it's an honest and secure election. So President Biden was right. He just didn't know it when he called it Jim Eagle. Well, yeah, exactly. All right. All right. Is there anything else you would like to share with our audience? You know what, here's one thing that I'm always pitching.

If you have concerns about election integrity in your state, work with your Secretary of State, work with your state legislature to make it better, but also sign up to be a poll worker. Every state is looking for men and women to work the polls on election day. It's a long day. It's sometimes a thankless task. In Ohio, it takes nearly 40,000 people to run our election day, and we're always looking for people. If you're in Ohio and voteohio.gov, voteohio.gov is the place to sign up. but anywhere in the country, just contact your local election office and tell them you want to work election day.

You'll come away from the experience more knowledgeable than you were before, and you'll be on the front lines of making sure, personally making sure that your states, your localities, elections are secure. All right. Well, we had Ohio Secretary of State, Frank LaRose. Thanks so much, sir. Awesome. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. If you have not done so already, be sure to subscribe to. the Daily Sigma podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. And please leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to

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