The New Threat to Democracy

June 14, 2024

We like to say in Ohio that if you don’t like the weather here wait five minutes. The same can be said lately of our politics.

The twists and contortions of the Democratic Party over their failure to get Joe Biden on the ballot are entertaining enough to qualify for the summer Olympics. They’re also entirely hypocritical.

For the past four years, every perceived attempt to manipulate the laws governing our elections has been decried nationwide by the political left as an outright threat to democracy.

If one dared to question the electoral process or worse yet hire a lawyer to challenge it, you’d be prosecuted as a criminal and persecuted as a traitor. You might even flip through a cadre of talking heads on the news channels declaring you constitutionally ineligible to ever appear on a ballot again.

That was yesterday’s script, when the hyperbolic frenzy over election manipulation and the fate of democracy was the left’s favorite cause of liberty. Today’s threat to the fabric of freedom is apparently me. As Ohio’s chief elections officer, I refuse to bend the rules to benefit a candidate, and my decision to uphold the law allegedly threatens to deprive millions of Ohio voters of a choice for president. Never mind that I didn’t create this problem, nor do I wish for that to be the outcome.

Unfortunately, state and national Democrats have given me no legally viable alternative. Their only suggestion so far? Rules for thee, but not for me. I’m afraid that won’t work.

Here’s the issue: Ohio has a statutory deadline by which political parties that choose their presidential and vice presidential candidates at a nominating convention must certify those choices to my office before they can appear on the statewide ballot.

The problem is the Democratic National Committee scheduled its nominating convention after Ohio’s statutory ballot access deadline. This has happened at least twice before, and both times the state legislature passed a temporary exception to the law, ironically enacted by majority Democrats 15 years ago. Today’s majority Republican lawmakers refused to fix a problem not of their making without getting something for the effort, so they offered up a ban on foreign billionaires funding our state elections. Ohio Democrats refused the deal, choosing to side with their noncitizen benefactors over their own party’s presidential nominee. So here we are.

Unable to get a legislative fix to the ballot access problem they created, Democrats have flipped the script. The threat to democracy that once was a refusal to enforce election rules is suddenly the refusal to bend them. To borrow a line from George Orwell’s 1984, “These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”

What should not be left unsaid here is that I have consistently believed it to be in the best interest of voters to have a choice in the race for president, from Donald Trump in Colorado to Joe Biden in Ohio. But I am also duty-bound to follow the law as Ohio’s chief elections officer.

For now, that law requires me to uphold a deadline that the Democratic Party appears willing to miss, and as a result their candidates for president and vice president of the United States might not appear on the statewide ballot. That is their choice, not mine.

Frank LaRose is currently serving his second term as Ohio’s 51st Secretary of State, presiding over local, state and federal elections as the state’s chief election officer. He is also a member of the U.S. Army Reserve, where he serves with a special forces unit.