Ohio secretary of state candidates divided over hand-marked ballots, redistricting

COLUMBUS, Ohio – In the race for Ohio secretary of state are Republicans who believe it’s too easy to cheat in voting and Democrats who believe recent state laws making it harder to vote have crossed into suppression.

Details about what they’d do, however, vary.

The Ohio secretary of state approves articles of incorporation for new businesses, hosts a campaign finance clearinghouse and other tasks. But the secretary’s most-watched duties are as the state’s chief elections officer.

Perhaps the most dynamic races on May 5 primary ballots are the secretary of state primaries. Unlike most of the statewide and federal races, each party is fielding two candidates with differences in background and ideas for running the office.

The two winners will face off in November.

Robert Sprague, the Ohio state treasurer from Findlay in Northwest Ohio, and Marcell Strbich, a retired Air Force intelligence lieutenant colonel and Dayton resident, are the Republicans in the race.

Allison Russo, an Ohio lawmaker from the Columbus suburbs who served as House minority leader, and Dr. Bryan Hambley, a leukemia doctor who lives in the Cincinnati suburbs, are the Democrats.

Ohio’s elections are considered secure, despite unproven claims by President Donald Trump that there’s widespread voter fraud.

Since launching the Election Integrity Unit in 2022, current Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who is term-limited and now running for state auditor, referred 119 cases of alleged noncitizens voting or registering to vote to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost. As of September 2024, just 12 resulted in charges, out of millions of votes cast. A spokesman for Yost didn’t return a message inquiring if that number had been updated.

Before serving as state treasurer, Sprague served in the General Assembly. In February, he gained the endorsement of the Ohio GOP.

Strbich is a relative political newcomer. He said he’s testified and helped draft bills that would make it harder to commit voter fraud.

Both men want more of a paper trail with voting.

Strbich would prefer most Ohio voters again use hand-marked paper ballots, except for voters with audio-visual disabilities, who could use a touch screen, he said. Counting paper ballots can take hours, if not days, without deploying other technology, such as counters and tabulators.

The state is unnecessarily spending millions on voting machine contract updates, replacements for touchscreen systems and cybersecurity upgrades, Strbich said.

Yet, despite these updates, Strbich said that cyber threats are sophisticated and the state’s electronic voting systems are not ready.

“It’s a huge waste of taxpayer money and it’s complicated because it’s all software-driven,” he said. “When you talk about filling out a pen-and-paper bubble for the vast majority of people… it’s about a tenth of the cost.”

Sprague isn’t calling for voters to use hand-marked paper ballots in most cases. But he would like to see more paper: A printout of each voter’s selections that they can rip from the voting machine and submit to poll workers. This printout is used in some counties, such as Franklin County, but not most. In most counties, the voting machine only has an internal roll of paper that records the vote, he said.

When polls close, counties that use the second piece of paper run those papers through a tabulation machine, overseen by a bipartisan team. The optical scanner determines who has won and lost by how many votes, almost immediately.

“You now have an immutable audit trail with that second separate stack of papers, as long as you don’t lose the chain of custody for those ballots, you go back and count them to make sure the machines are reflecting 100% accuracy,” Sprague said.

Both candidates oppose ballot drop boxes. Sprague last week began airing ads across the state to televise his position on the matter.

Between April 10-May 5, over $344,000 in ads in favor of Sprague have been purchased for cable, television and radio in all Ohio markets.

Strbich said he isn’t running television ads. He said he’s not taking PAC money.

“In that sense, Bryan Hambley and I are similar,” he said, referring to the Democratic candidate who has refused corporate PAC money.

The Ohio Democratic Party has not endorsed either candidate in the secretary of state’s race.

As in the Republican primary, the candidates are using experience and outsider status on the campaign trail.

Russo is an experienced politician and Hambley is a political outsider who is not taking PAC money and who became interested in the secretary of state’s office when working on the 2024 campaign that tried to change Ohio’s redistricting process by creating a citizen-led commission to draw political maps. The campaign failed.

Hambley has been in the race longer than Russo. But his main critique of his opponent is that she voted in 2023 for a state legislative map that continues to give Ohio Republicans an advantage. In his mind this map is unconstitutional because it doesn’t reflect the true political makeup of state voters.

Russo said that in voting for the 2023 map, she was able to negotiate for two additional Democratic-leaning seats. If the 2023 maps didn’t get bipartisan support, the Ohio Constitution requires state political leaders to gather and draw a new map four years later. Russo feared “a no-vote would have allowed the Republicans to gerrymander us into oblivion” in the subsequent map.

“The assumption that I had a good choice and a bad choice is a false premise,” she said, saying in general she agrees with Hambley that the redistricting process is broken.

Russo said that her experience is what she thinks separates her from Hambley.

“I’ve actually been in the arena doing that work,” she said. “At this moment in time, when I think people are truly concerned about the threat to democracy and the attacks on democracy, we need a secretary of state who is not on a learning curve.”

Hambley said he’ll be a champion for the voter as secretary of state. If elected, he’ll lead an effort to take redistricting out of the hands of political leaders. He believes a citizen-led commission should be in control.

“Democrats have been doing very badly for the past decade in Ohio,” he said. “We need to talk more about health care. We need to talk more about education. And I think if you’re running for secretary of state, you’ll need to be talking about how gerrymandering has allowed our state to fail so many Ohioans on these policies. We’ve got to be connecting these offices with things that people care about.”…Read more by Laura Hancock, cleveland.com