Improving the Enforcement of Election Crimes

July 1, 2025

In sociology, there’s a concept known as the normalization of deviance. It’s the idea that a problem can go unresolved for so long it becomes an accepted part of the normal routine.

This is often what happens with election crimes. As Ohio’s chief election officer, I’ve referred hundreds of voting-related cases to prosecutors, asking them to pursue charges against individuals who defraud democracy. Many of them go no further than a prosecutorial filing cabinet.

The excuses are endless. Some prosecutors claim the evidence is flimsy. Some say they don’t have the resources to investigate relatively innocuous offenses. Others simply lack the political will. Whatever the reason, the offenses too often go unenforced, setting up the false claim that election fraud doesn’t exist.

Prosecutors have a tough job enforcing crime under an increasingly prejudiced judiciary, but I need their help. Ohio law requires me to refer election crimes to them under a very low burden of proof. Most of them do excellent work in support of our efforts, and where these cases have been prosecuted, they’ve led to convictions.

I’ve also done my part to improve the quality of the evidence in these cases. I created the first full-time Election Integrity Unit in the Secretary of State’s office, staffed with professional investigators with backgrounds in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Secret Service, and the Ohio State Highway Patrol. The problem, though, really isn’t the evidence; it’s the lack of commitment to pursuing these cases.

Ohio law requires prosecutors to file charges in these cases within a “reasonable time,” which some interpret to mean up to six years. In Cuyahoga County, so much time had passed in one case that the alleged offender died before the case could be taken over by the attorney general because the county prosecutor failed to act.

To fix this problem, I asked the General Assembly to set a clear timeline for prosecuting these cases. Within 21 months, prosecutors can either file charges or ask us for more evidence. If they decline to prosecute, the case can be handed over to the Attorney General for further review. Some county prosecutors don’t like that idea, so they asked Governor DeWine to veto the provision from the state budget bill. Unfortunately, he gave them the easy out.

Let me be clear that I’d rather be fighting election crime than fighting the people responsible for prosecuting it. This might even cost me some political support. But I have a duty under the law to uphold the integrity of Ohio’s elections, and that starts with enforcing the laws.

Statistics prove that an unprosecuted crime is an undeterred crime. We’ve all seen news coverage of California criminals busting into retail stores to brazenly yank phones and tablets from their display stations. Most of these miscreants run out the front door without so much as a bystander filming their misdeeds, seldom facing a criminal charge. Why? Because California’s justice system doesn’t prioritize these offenses. The bad behavior has become so normalized that organized retail theft is up 30 percent in the last five years.

Inaction is not an acceptable strategy. Albert Einstein is credited with saying that the world will not be destroyed by those who do evil but by those who watch them without doing anything about it. Whether or not this sentiment is original to Einstein, I agree with it.

Laws are not suggestions. They can only be effective if we enforce them. Election crime exists, and we are normalizing the deviance by failing to prosecute it.