OHIO ELECTIONS

If you need photo ID to cash a check, board a plane, or buy cold medicine, you certainly need it to vote. Voter ID is the most basic security check to make sure only U.S. citizens decide our elections. If you can’t prove citizenship, you shouldn’t be anywhere near a ballot box—period.

Variances and mistakes in the voter registration database are open windows to voter fraud.  With more than 8 million registered voters in Ohio, maintaining real-time accuracy of the database is challenging but not impossible.  With the Trump Administration pledging to share critical federal data with the states, combined with using private sector data used by credit bureaus and financial services, Ohio can ensure that only qualified electors remain on the voter rolls.  Under Robert Sprague, Ohio will diligently maintain our voter data and remove all erroneous entries, dead voters, and people who have moved or opted out of the democratic process.

Ohio bans foreign donations to candidates and rightly fought the leftist extremists to extend the ban to issue campaigns in Ohio, where out-of -country liberal billionaires have sought to get their hooks into Ohio’s constitution.  It is mind-boggling and shameful that the concept of banning foreign influence on Ohio elections is at all arguable, and under Secretary Robert Sprague, American elections will remain only for Americans.

Make no mistake, our nation’s enemies work tirelessly to infiltrate our voting systems and meddle in our elections, and with our decentralized system of election administration among the counties, there are countless points of entry for cyber-attacks.  Sprague will work collaboratively with the 88 boards to ensure our IT systems are firewalled against all attacks, foreign or domestic.  While our voting machines are never connected to the internet and cannot be breached, every component within our elections system must be constantly evaluated and updated, and our elections officials properly trained to stop evolving threats.

Ohio can be proud of the fact that it audits every election, every time, and invariably finds that election results are 99.9% accurate.  The same scrutiny and evaluation that we apply to the election results should be applied to the myriad processes and components of the voting process that go into the final tally, from the mailing of military overseas ballots to the certification of election results.  Robert Sprague will work with the boards of elections to review all processes and chains-of-custody requirements after every election to ensure every rule and every procedure was followed throughout. 

We can’t have a strong democracy without informed citizens. Robert Sprague is partnering with Vivek Ramaswamy to launch a bold new civics education push—teaching Ohio’s next generation about their rights, their responsibilities, and the hard truth that freedom survives only if you fight for it. When young Americans know the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and what’s at stake, they’ll stand up—and show up—at the ballot box.