Frank LaRose, Ohio secretary of state

By 2019, LaRose had left the Senate and assumed the role of secretary of state.

He made headlines that year for promoting automatic voter registration − something he now opposes − and flagging registered voters he said weren’t citizens. He called a tweet from Trump racist. Beyond that, LaRose’s first year in office was relatively uneventful. Then 2020 happened.

As Ohio’s chief elections officer, LaRose

was at the center of a messy fight over whether to hold a primary at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. He spent the rest of the year navigating lawsuits and preparing election officials for an influx of mail-in voting. Throughout the chaos, LaRose also pushed back against false claims about the election process.

He defended Ohio’s mail-in voting system when Trump suggested the practice would lead to widespread fraud. He admitted that misinformation from anyone − including the former president − made his job more difficult and needed to be addressed. He told Fox News that changing tallies as votes are counted aren’t “a sign that something nefarious is happening.”

“There’s too much hyperbole on both sides when it comes to elections and election integrity,” LaRose told the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau. “We need to be able to say that yes, it’s easy to vote; yes, it’s hard to cheat. These are the ways that we do that. The conspiracy theories and all the wild ideas that exist on both the left and the right, we need to be very honest about those and make sure people know this is how elections truly work.”

But LaRose’s opponents say his tone changed as he inched closer to his U.S. Senate bid − something he dismissed as “campaign rhetoric.”

LaRose continued to defend Ohio as the gold standard but questioned voting practices in other states. He pulled out of a bipartisan elections group targeted by conservatives that aims to prevent double voting in multiple states. He fired a longtime communications staffer after the person’s disparaging comments about Trump surfaced on social media.

Throughout all of that, the secretary of state’s office saw an exodus of employees who said they were burned out and frustrated with LaRose’s fixation on politics.

“In nearly every Republican primary, candidates shift to the right, just as in nearly every Democratic primary, Democrats