Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose sided with Democrats this week as he broke a tie in a high-profile elections case and upheld U.S. Rep. Emilia Sykes’ eligibility to vote.
It wasn’t the first time LaRose broke ranks with his party in a similar situation, although it has been a relative rarity.
In this week’s case, LaRose said Sykes, a Democrat, provided enough evidence that she lives in Akron, where she’s registered to vote. The Summit County Board of Elections had deadlocked on the case, with the board’s two Democrats saying Sykes proved her residency in response to a GOP activist’s challenge. The two Republicans said the evidence showed she didn’t.
All county boards of elections in Ohio have two Republicans and two Democrats, and the secretary of state casts tie-breaking votes when they deadlock.
In response to LaRose’s decision, Sykes’ campaign issued a statement calling the unsuccessful challenge, which was filed in the weeks before Sykes won her Nov. 5 election, a distraction and a “baseless political attack.”
To try to contextualize the news, Signal Statewide checked 22 cases dating back to January 2022 in which LaRose was asked to break a tie.
He sided with Republicans in 14 cases and with Democrats in four cases. He punted on three cases. In one case last month involving a challenge to a nonpartisan judicial candidate in Morgan County, Signal couldn’t immediately tell how LaRose’s vote squared with local party officials’ votes.
“Secretary LaRose does not vote based on a particular party, he votes with the law,” spokesperson Dan Luschek told Signal Statewide in an email.
Here are a few of the most notable instances in which LaRose sided with Republicans:
- October 2024 – In Summit County, LaRose voted with Republicans to set a full quasi-judicial hearing to review the Sykes voting eligibility challenge. Democrats had said the GOP activist who challenged Sykes’ eligibility failed to clear the legal bar to do so.
- September 2024 – In Mahoning County, LaRose voted with Republicans to allow GOP state Rep. Tex Fischer, who had been appointed to a vacant Ohio House seat, to run in the November election. Democrats had voted to reject Fischer’s candidacy, saying he violated state law by not disclosing he had legally changed his middle name in 2020.
- September 2023 – In Logan County, LaRose voted with Republicans to allow a local citizen-initiated ordinance banning drag performances to appear on the local ballot. The Ohio Supreme Court ended up unanimously overruling LaRose, saying he shouldn’t have blocked it due to errors that referendum organizers made on their petition paperwork.
Other examples include a January 2024 decision in which LaRose sided with Republicans to allow a local Republican candidate to run for the county commission, an April 2023 case in which he agreed with Republicans that a local ticket tax in Lucas County couldn’t be subjected to a referendum, and a September 2023 case in which he sided with Republicans to block a referendum over a local annexation.
When LaRose sided with Democrats
Four of the five cases in which LaRose sided with Democrats came this year, including this week’s vote on the Sykes case.
Two of the cases happened in Delaware County. In February, LaRose agreed with Democrats and blocked an attempt from local Republicans to disqualify from the ballot a Democratic appellate judge who had switched to run as a Republican. In another case in October, LaRose sided with Democrats and rejected an activist’s mass challenge to voters suspected of having registered in other states, saying the activist’s evidence didn’t adequately support the claim.
LaRose also voted in October with Democrats in Fairfield County to reject another mass challenge of voter eligibility, although he did so on technical grounds and urged the citizen behind the effort to refile it.
Ed Helvey, one of the two Democrats on the Delaware County Board of Elections, in an interview praised LaRose’s handling of the Delaware County cases, saying he took a more dispassionate view than local Republicans. But like other state Democrats, he also criticized LaRose for what he said was partisan handling of recent ballot issues.
What official election results say about Sherrod Brown’s loss
Politics nerds are poring over newly available, highly detailed election data after Ohio officially certified the results of the Nov. 5 presidential election this week.
The new data show that Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown – who lost his reelection bid to Republican challenger Bernie Moreno – won five of Ohio’s 15 congressional districts, including narrow victories in two congressional districts also won by Republican former President Donald Trump.
The Brown-Trump districts are Ohio’s 9th Congressional District, anchored by Toledo, and 10th Congressional District, anchored by Dayton. Brown won both by less than 1%, according to interactive maps developed by Andrew Green, who posts on X under the moniker Ohio Politics Guru.
In contrast, Trump won the 9th District by 6.7 percentage points. Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur meanwhile was reelected narrowly, winning there by 0.63 percentage points. Trump won the 10th District by 5.7 percentage points, considerably underperforming Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, who was reelected by 18 percentage points.
The results reinforce that the 10th District hypothetically could be competitive for Democrats someday, especially if Turner ever retires.
They also show how far Brown has slipped politically since the 2018 election, when he won nine congressional districts, including the 9th District by 17 points and the 10th District by nearly 7 points.
That’s a lot of zeros
Another fun fact: Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris won Ohio’s 13th Congressional District by just 175 votes, or 0.04 percentage points. Sykes, the Akron Democrat, defeated Republican challenger Kevin Coughlin in that district by a comparatively comfortable 8,542 votes, or 2 percentage points.
Mark the calendar
Monday, Dec. 9 – U.S. Transportation Secretary – and potential future Democratic presidential candidate? – Pete Buttigieg is speaking at the City Club of Cleveland.
Wednesday, Dec. 11 – Ohio House session, 11 a.m.
Wednesday, Dec. 11 – Ohio Senate session, 1:30 p.m.
