Last week, in a 26-minute Oval Office speech, President Trump listed Ohio as one of 18 states where, in 2020, China somehow compromised the election results.
Not in 2016, when he won the presidential election, or 2024, where he was returned to the White House.
Just 2020. The election he lost.
He should know something about attempts to influence elections.
There is the now-famous recording of Trump calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in 2016 and asking him to find 11,780 more votes to flip Georgia to him.
Raffensperger explained to Trump that he couldn’t do that. It would be illegal election interference, he told Trump.
Trump's claims about China interfering in our elections are so far unproven.
“My administration is in the process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised by the People's Republic of China and many others," Trump said. "We are committing to fix it and we're also committing to be working with those states and local jurisdictions to help them fix and patch known technical vulnerabilities before the midterm elections."
That put Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who often says that Ohio is the “gold standard” for free and fair elections, in an awkward position.
He knows full well that the kind of skullduggery Trump suggested simply doesn’t exist.
Ben Kindle, LaRose’s press secretary, gave a statement to WVXU that makes it plain.
“Based on the information we’ve received from our federal partners, China might have accessed publicly available voting data about 10 years ago. This is the same transparent information that anyone in the world can access with an internet connection.
"While it’s not a breach of any kind, it’s a good reminder that bad actors are out there, and it’s the reason Secretary LaRose built one of the strongest election security programs in the world,” Kindle said.
The only possible purpose of Trump’s speech last week was to sow the seeds of doubt in the public’s mind about whether vote tabulations are legitimate.
Kindle said it well: voter rolls are public record, available to anyone.
Me, you, your Aunt Agnes, and, yes, China.
They also are available to candidates, political parties, and PACs, and organizations that want to communicate directly to Ohio voters.
Putting the lie to Trump’s most outrageous claims is not very difficult.
- First of all, there is the fact that the vote tabulation in Ohio’s 88 counties is not tied to the internet.
- Every one of the 88 county boards of elections are made up of two Democrats and two Republicans.
- In addition, every job in the county board of elections has two people – one Republican, one Democrat – from the board executive offices to the loading dock; the idea is that they keep an eye on each other but generally get along famously.
- All electronic voting machines have a verifiable paper trail.
Another claim to clear up
In that same speech, Trump also made the claim that “illegal immigrants” by the hundreds of thousands are voting in U.S. elections.
There is no proof of that, in Ohio or anywhere else.
Look at it from the perspective of someone here illegally — maybe a farm worker, maybe someone working in a restaurant kitchen.
The very last thing you want to do is interact with the government — and registering to vote is certainly interacting with government.
Your cover would be blown. You could be deported back to your home country.
That’s why non-citizens voting is so rare as to be virtually non-existent.
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