Next month voters will elect a new secretary of state, Ohio’s chief elections officer who oversees vote counts, administers citizens’ referendums and wields unique power over the state’s basic democratic systems.
Whoever wins will have command of a seat held by Republicans for the last 16 years. That’s an era defined by Ohio’s new and increasingly restrictive state voting laws and tremendous skepticism stoked by President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 election and that voting systems are easily rigged.
Robert Sprague, 53, the current state treasurer, is the Republican candidate. He won the GOP nomination after defeating an opponent who embraced Trump’s cynicism around electronic voting machines. Allison Russo, 50, a state lawmaker who until recently led the minority caucus in the Ohio House, earned the spot on the November ballot after beating an outside Democratic challenger who depicted her as too cozy with Republicans. Libertarian and business owner Tom Pruss is also seeking the position but has not mounted a campaign to make himself competitive.
At the heart of differences between the two major candidates, Russo and Sprague, are new, GOP-backed state laws – one requiring voters to present proof of citizenship to register to vote and another requiring them to produce one from a short list of government-issued photo identification in order to vote. In addition, there’s the related, Republican-backed ballot initiative to enshrine some of the voter identification requirements into Ohio’s Constitution, which requires voters’ approval on the November ballot.
Russo opposed all three and characterized them as thinly veiled political efforts to hype up the extraordinarily rare problem of voter fraud. And the new rules, she said, will disenfranchise voters in the name of solving a problem that barely exists.
Sprague is embracing the voter laws, framing them as common-sense policies to secure elections.
“I’m running on photo ID,” Sprague said in an interview with Signal Ohio. “I want to make sure that our elections are secure and that they’re fair and that they’re transparent and that people can trust them. I think it’s the biggest issue.”
You can read Signal Statewide’s interview with Sprague here.
You can read Signal Statewide’s interview with Russo here.
What does the secretary of state do?
The Ohio Secretary of State oversees 88 county boards of elections; casts tiebreaking votes in certain election challenges; sits on state panels that control the redistricting and citizen referendum processes; and registers businesses in the state. He or she also tends to be a respected voice among lawmakers when considering changes to voting laws.
Compared to the higher-profile races in Ohio that are marked by a flood of negative TV ads, this race has been tame and focused on the stark policy differences between the two major candidates, both of whom have already had active roles in government and politics.
Take redistricting, the regular (until recently, every 10 years) process of redrawing the boundaries for Statehouse and congressional races to adjust for states’ changing populations. Ohio in 2015 and 2018 enacted reforms intended to limit gerrymandering, the manipulation of those district lines for partisan gain at the expense of skewed voter representation. After a tangle of lawsuits and judicial elections that changed the composition of the Ohio Supreme Court, political maps favoring Republicans wound up taking effect. This happened even after the Ohio Supreme Court repeatedly deemed the maps unconstitutional because they resulted in gerrymandering.
Russo says the current redistricting system is a disaster because the lack of enforcement power by the court allowed Republicans to gain an advantage through more districts that favored GOP voting patterns.
Sprague said the system, however messy, worked. He said the system forced a bipartisan compromise that Russo herself agreed to. Democrats, Sprague said, want changes only because they didn’t like the outcome.
Candidates offer different views on what election oversight should mean
During Signal Ohio’s separate, roughly 45-minute interviews with the candidates, a broader difference emerged that reflects how they and their parties view oversight of the elections. Sprague views the goal as a total eradication of fraud. Russo views the goal as ensuring a secure election, but not at the cost of disenfranchising eligible voters.
“You are breeding mistrust in our system by this rhetoric, and I think that’s incredibly irresponsible,” Russo said of Republicans’ claims of alleged election fraud.
“But number two, you’re also setting up changes to election law and procedure that prevent actual eligible voters from being able to have their votes counted. And to me, that is just as serious as wanting to eliminate voting pride. We should care just as much about ensuring that every single eligible voter has their vote counted.”
Biggest difference between the candidates is over voter identification
In 2022, Russo led the Democrats’ opposition to House Bill 458. That bill ended Ohio’s looser rules around voter identification, which required poll workers to accept utility bills, student ID cards, ID issued by other states or bank statements as proof of identity. Those forms are now considered invalid.
The bill also shortens timelines related to mail-in voting. It requires voters to get ballots in sooner and gives them less time to cure any mistakes on their ballot envelop or identification. The bill passed almost entirely on party lines.
Then, in June, Russo voted against the legislative process that placed a ballot issue on the November ballot that would enshrine the current, stricter photo ID requirements for voters in the state constitution.
The move by lawmakers was driven by concerns around voter fraud. But fraud is extraordinarily rare. A database built by the Heritage Foundation – a conservative think tank and advocate for strict voter ID laws – identified 63 instances of voter fraud prosecutions in Ohio since 2000, an infinitesimally small percentage of the hundreds of millions of ballots cast in that time. Noncitizen voting is about as rare. An audit issued by current Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose found 138 instances of noncitizen voting in Ohio’s 2024 elections. That’s out of nearly 5.9 million ballots cast and equates to .0023% of the total vote.
Sprague said Ohio shouldn’t relent just because instances of fraud are rare. He said strict rules breathe trust into a system, and he noted that some local races and levies really do come down to single-digit margins.
“What I can tell you is that voter fraud is – there’s not a lot of it, but it’s real. And it does happen,” he said.
Polling indicates that roughly 8 in 10 Americans support photo identification requirements to vote. For that reason, some Democrats – gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton being the marquee example – have moved away from the party’s long-held opposition. She supports Issue 3, describing it as broadly popular and codifying what’s already settled law.
But others, like Russo, think this support from voters is superficial and fades away when they ponder the details.
Russo made several technocratic arguments against the new laws and the effort to lock them in the Ohio Constitution. For one, she said there are a lot of older Ohioans with expired IDs because they can no longer drive. The new laws will force them to track down documents like birth certificates and then find rides to the BMV or board of elections, all just to vote.
Secondly, she said it’s a changing world, and the new laws and constitutional mandates will make it too difficult for Ohio’s elections systems to adapt to things like digital identification. The current voter ID law requires the state to offer free state IDs, but that requirement didn’t make the cut for the constitution.
“I think it’s a terrible way to do elections,” she said.
Interview highlights
Key points from the candidate interviews include:
- While Sprague has in the past floated the idea of making Election Day a state holiday, he told Signal Ohio he has since reconsidered.
- Russo said of different kinds of government fraud alleged by Republicans that “if there’s massive fraud, it lays at their feet.”
- Sprague called on Russo to resign from her private-sector job as a healthcare consultant, given that the company entered a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice for giving erroneous consulting advice to an insurer that led to massive overpayments from the federal government. Russo, who was not personally accused of any wrongdoing or knowledge of the underlying work, called the matter a desperate ploy.
- There’s no debate scheduled between the two candidates. Sprague said Russo refused one with Spectrum, which Russo denies.
- While it has little bearing on the secretary of state’s office, Sprague called his 2011 vote on a major anti-union bill a “mistake” and remarked on Republicans’ political evolution with private sector unions.