A declared candidate for Ohio Secretary of State in 2018 visited Brown County on July 13.
Ohio State Senator Frank LaRose from District 27 met with members of the Brown County Board of Elections and members of the county Republican party in Mt. Orab.
Ohio Senate District 27 is composed of parts of Stark, Summit and Wayne counties, near the Akron and Canton area.
LaRose is currently Chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee and was elected in 2010 and 2014.  He will be term-limited out of office at the end of 2018.
“Running for secretary of state is a chance for me to ensure that our elections are more secure and more efficient, and that’s why I’m doing it,” LaRose said.
“When I arrived in the senate, I was the only veteran, so (Secretary of State) Jon Husted asked me to work on a bill to make it easier for overseas military personnel to cast their ballots.  It kind of put me on this path of working on election issues.”
LaRose said he was impressed with the local GOP members he met.
“I met with a great group of people.  They told me about the work that they are doing to increase voter turnout.  It’s great to see that the Brown County Republicans are organized at the local level to make sure that in each community that their neighbors are getting out to vote.”
LaRose said he was also pleased to meet members of the local board of elections.
“What I saw were folks that were very devoted to conducting accurate, fair and efficient elections.  Every day in 88 counties in Ohio, Republicans and Democrats come to work together in the same office and run elections.  And that’s a success story.  I’m inspired by what our elections folks do to run elections and I met some of those folks this morning.”
LaRose is originally from the Akron area, and served in the Army for ten years.  He spent four years as an engineer for 101st Airborne Division and six years as a green beret on the special forces team.
“My passion for elections started with my military experience because I got to see people vote for the first time in places like Kosovo and Iraq and what it meant to them…The idea that elections are very powerful instruments is not new to me.  It’s something that I’ve seen firsthand,” LaRose said.
He also weighed in on the effort by the Trump Administration to look into the election system in search of possible fraud or abuse.
“I applaud any effort to examine our election process and make it better.  This is no different from what President Obama did in 2013 when he created a bipartisan commission of Republicans and Democrats to study the results fo the 2012 election,” LaRose said.
“Elections are a state by state endeavor, not a federal endeavor.  So it will be up to the states about whether they want to implement the recommendations that come out of the presidential elections investigation.”
LaRose said he planned to spend the next few months fundraising and meeting voters.
“A campaign is nothing more than a year long job interview and every day I have a chance to meet with my prospective employers, and that’s what I’m working on.”