Ohio’s attorney general announced this week that six Ohioans have been indicted for illegal voting as non-citizens - a fourth-degree felony - between 2008 and 2020.
But one of those indicted people has been dead for nearly two years.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) had referred nearly 600 cases of potential voter irregularities to county prosecutors in September. When they didn’t act, he took them to Attorney General Dave Yost (R), who presented them to grand juries.
“All of these cases had been previously declined for prosecution," said Yost in a Tuesday press conference announcing the six cases that had resulted in indictments by grand juries across the state. "This is a very small number of cases. Voting irregularities like this are rare."
A Cuyahoga County voter was among the six indicted and was scheduled for arraignment next month. But that person has been dead since December 2022, said Democratic prosecutor Michael O’Malley. He said in a statement that his office is "philosophically opposed to indicting deceased individuals who clearly have no way of defending themselves."
He added: "This is one of the greatest examples of prosecutorial overreach I have ever witnessed. The practice of indicting the deceased is draconian. This is not how we would have handled this case in my office. I am calling on Ohio Attorney General David Yost to immediately dismiss this indictment."
Yost’s office has said he’ll dismiss the indictment.
The six cases were among 597 election integrity cases that were sent to county prosecutors in September by LaRose. Those prosecutors took action on only a few of that total number. When LaRose criticized that inaction,
Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association executive director Lou Tobin said: “These are referrals that often lack minimal evidence necessary to pursue charges or pursue an indictment, let alone obtain a conviction."
LaRose then took the cases to Yost, saying, “I have full confidence that our excellent attorney general takes this seriously and is going to dig into this."
Yost noted at his news conference that 138 of those cases referred by LaRose were suspected to be illegal voting, but most dealt with improper voter registration, which his office doesn't have the authority to prosecute. But he said he was concerned about the focus on that.
"I think that we ought to be focusing on the voting. And he's got some resources as well, if he wants these cases pursued," Yost said. "I'm thinking that I don't really want to pull people off of officer-involved critical incident investigations, child rapists and murderers to be chasing voter registration cases for past elections. That's a meeting that we need to have and talk about resources and how they're deployed."
Voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment banning non-citizens from voting in local or state elections in 2022. Ohio officials have repeatedly said the state runs the "gold standard" of elections systems.
