Sprague is the GOP's better choice for secretary of state

Robert Sprague was on to something when he told us the same attributes that have served him well as Ohio's treasurer would translate well into being Ohio's secretary of state. Sprague, a Republican, argued in an endorsement interview that voters should want a capable professional overseeing the Buckeye State's elections, which is the primary function of the secretary of state. We have found Sprague to be exactly that during his eight years as treasurer. In fact, we've endorsed him for the role three times, once in the 2018 GOP primary, in the general election that year and again when he won his second term in 2022. In all three of those endorsements, we wrote that voters should want a "sober and stable" candidate to manage taxpayer dollars. We believe voters should prize those same qualities in a secretary of state, which is among the reasons we're endorsing Spague over his primary rival, 44-year-old election activist and former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer Marcell Strbich. While we appreciate Strbich's military service, he's untested in elected office. The 53-year-old Sprague, on the other hand, has proved himself not only as state treasurer, but as a member of the Ohio House and before that as Findlay's elected city auditor and treasurer. It's also important to recognize that while the secretary of state, like the state treasurer, is elected on a partisan basis, once the election is over the job requires a nonpartisan approach. That's something that term-limited Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, has struggled with, especially when it comes to his work on the Ohio Ballot Board. He's massaged ballot language on a few statewide issues to help achieve a partisan outcome. Sprague disagreed with our concerns about LaRose's handling of ballot issues, but he did acknowledge that the secretary of state needed to ensure fair elections for voters of all political persuasions. Strbich told us that "I'm not running to give the Republicans an advantage or to harm the Democrats," but we came away with the impression that he would be far more partisan in executing his duties as the state's chief elections officer. A more partisan approach, along with questioning the results of the 2020 election — Strbich leaned into those questions far more than Sprague did — might play well in a Republican primary, but could be a liability in the general election. (To be clear, Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, despite President Donald Trump's insistence that it was stolen from him. He has never produced credible evidence to bolster his false claims. Losing isn't proof of fraud.) Two Democrats, Dr. Bryan Hambley and state Rep. Allison Russo, are vying for their party's nomination for secretary of state. Voter fraud is exceedingly rare, not only in Ohio, but the rest of the United States. It shouldn't happen, but, as LaRose is fond of pointing out, in Ohio it's easy to vote and hard to cheat. Which makes us wonder why Republicans, including Sprague and Strbich, seem so eager to make voting harder. Many of their proposals, including requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, mirror the so-called SAVE America Act that Trump is trying to muscle through Congress. Were some of those ideas to become law, it would become much harder for millions of Americans to vote because they don't have the necessary paperwork on hand. Additionally, Sprague and Strbich said they wanted to impose stricter limits on mail-in voting, which Republicans, including Trump, have argued is a vehicle for fraud. Never mind, apparently, that Trump himself used a mail-in ballot to vote in a recent Florida election. "I decided that I was going to vote by mail-in ballot because I couldn't be there, because I had a lot of different things," Trump said. Lots of other Americans have "a lot of different things" going on in their lives which make it hard to "be there" at the polls on Election Day. Of the two candidates, Sprague struck us as having the more realistic take on what sort of mail-in voting would be acceptable. Then there's the idea that the electronic voting machines that many Ohio counties use are somehow suspect. Strbich was much more emphatic about moving to paper ballots, although he told us that he would find optical-scan ballots — the kind where voters would fill in bubbles — acceptable. Sprague told us he wanted to make sure voters have a paper version of their ballot to review their votes on electronic voting machines and so there would be a paper trail that could be audited. Every elections board in the state conducts routine audits on their electronic voting machine results. Those audits routinely show that the results are around 99.9 percent accurate, something LaRose regularly trumpets in post-election news releases. It's also worth noting that Sprague won the endorsement of the Ohio Republican Party in the primary. Strbich had pushed the party not to endorse in the race. We believe the state GOP got it right. Republican voters should similarly back Sprague.