Two of the three candidates to succeed Ohio’s current secretary of state support his decision not to release sensitive voter information to President Donald Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity. And the third, who would not comment for this story, is accusing her primary opponent of not being a loyal Republican because he criticized Trump in the election. The commission, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, was formed by presidential decree in May after Trump repeatedly said he only lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because of three to five million illegal votes. There’s no proof of such widespread voter fraud. On that, Rep. Kathleen Clyde and Sen. Frank LaRose, each a candidate for secretary of state, agree. “To say that there is massive widespread voter fraud is not correct in my assessment,” said LaRose, who didn’t mind “studying the issue.”
“I would agree that the argument that there is a voter fraud problem is a lot of hot air. Secretary of State Jon Husted himself has proven multiple times that it is virtually non-existent,” Clyde concurred.
… The two local candidates — Clyde, D-Kent, and LaRose, R-Hudson — disagree on the intent of a commission established to uncover something that has been so widely debunked.
“It’s an effort to legitimize something that is non-existent,” said Clyde, who casts aspersions at Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach, the leader of the election investigation. Kobach has championed a controversial cross-check system that gathers voter’s identification numbers (which are not public), addresses and names. Husted shared this information on Ohioans. Then Kobach helped state election chiefs strike names from voter rolls — often incorrectly — if similar variations of their names appeared on two or more state voter registration databases.
Full Article: How Trump, Russia and purging voters is shaping the race for Ohio’s next elections chief – Local – Ohio.