COLUMBUS – Ohio’s top elections official says he continues to take steps to head off a potentially chaotic November election.
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Those include adding clarity to absentee ballot request forms, tracking poll worker recruitment and upgrading his website to clearly show how many absentee ballots are outstanding on Election Night.
Secretary of State Frank LaRose also urged voters to be wary of the words and deeds of some fellow Republicans, labeling President Donald Trump’s advice that people vote twice as “misinformation.”
“To be clear, in Ohio and any other state, you can only vote once, so don’t test the system by trying to do it twice. It’s a bad idea,” La Rose said.
He said knowingly voting more than once is a criminal offense.
Hear the full interview with Secretary of State Frank LaRose
During campaign appearances in North Carolina and Pennsylvania last week, Trump encouraged voters who mail in their ballots to go to polling locations on Election Day and vote in person to make sure their vote is counted.
LaRose says voters who cast absentee ballots early and also try to vote in person on Nov. 3 will be asked to fill out a provisional ballot which would only count if the voter’s absentee ballot is not counted.
LaRose reiterated an “effective deadline” of Oct. 27 for requesting mail-in ballots, which precedes the cutoff set by the General Assembly by four days, to allow for postal delays.
LaRose is not the only one encouraging Ohioans to vote.
The state Democratic Party has launched a “Make It Count” campaign and the city of Columbus has kicked off the nonpartisan Vote Safe Columbus initiative, focusing on registering Columbus residents to vote and discussing the absentee voting process and early Voting opportunities.
Amid concerns that many people who would ordinarily work at the state’s hundreds of polling locations will stay away due to concerns about the COVID-19 –pandemic, LaRose is recruiting workers.
The state needs at least 37,057 people to fully staff polling places in Ohio’s 88 counties but LaRose is shooting for over 55,000 trained workers and has a number of recruiting efforts underway, including those targeting attorneys, accountants and high schoolers, who can legally work at polling locations at age 17.
A tracker at LaRose’s website allows voters to see the minimum number of poll workers required to run an election in their county, by total and by party, and the remaining number of poll workers needed for each county.
Each county’s board of elections appoints four eligible voters for each precinct who are residents of the county to serve as poll workers. Under state law, not more than one-half of the total number of poll workers assigned to a precinct may be members of the same political party.