Kevin Johnson is the Executive Director of the Election Reformers Network, a national nonpartisan organization advancing common sense reforms to protect elections from polarization.
What would the NCAA do if the head referee in the Ohio State-Michigan game spent his free time leading rallies and fundraisers for the Wolverines? Even if he assured fans he’d be neutral for the game itself, Buckeye nation would never believe him.
This scenario just happened in the political arena, in the campaign surrounding the August 8 Issue 1 ballot initiative.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose planned, campaigned for, solicited money for, and bent state rules for the “yes” vote in that election. During the final weeks of the campaign, he was a declared candidate for the U.S. Senate with a personal interest in taking sides to gain GOP support. Though implications for the abortion ballot initiative in November have dominated news coverage of August’s Issue 1, this leadership failure atop the state’s election system should not be ignored. Ohio Elections need neutral referees just as much as sports do.
LaRose brushed off accusations of conflicts of interest, saying campaigning occurred outside his “official function.” But imagine a judge publicly giving advice to help one side win a case before him; he’d still be sanctioned if he did so outside his courtroom. Likewise, open public bias from election administrators shouldn’t happen, whether within official functions or not.
LaRose is hardly alone. Research found that one-third of secretaries of state serving since 2000 endorsed a candidate running in a race under their supervision, and 20% lost lawsuits in circumstances where secretaries’ actions arguably favored their political party. Tellingly, these partisan acts occurred at a higher rate among the subset of secretaries who ran for higher office — as LaRose is now.
Ohio elections have been undermined before by blatant partisanship in the conduct of elections, under Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who co-chaired President George W. Bush’s state reelection campaign and set rules reducing voter registration and provisional ballots to help Bush win.
Ethical problems happen on both sides politically. Since 2021, Colorado’s Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold has led a political action committee that spent millions helping Democrats win in battleground states. While not illegal, her actions no doubt make it harder for Colorado Republicans to trust she’ll neutrally administer elections in the state.
Secretaries of state often argue that they don’t count the votes or manage polling stations, so bias poses no risk to elections. But that argument overestimates citizens’ knowledge of election details, and underestimates their need for individual leaders, not a system, to trust in. And secretaries do have discretion over election steps that can impact turnout and thus results, discretion LaRose apparently used to help “yes” voters get around paperwork hurdles this summer.
Frank LaRose is a decorated military veteran who expertly managed pandemic elections in 2020. But his sense of duty and discipline seems to have disappeared under the pressure candidates face these days to prove their hyper-partisan bona fides. His failings illustrated why, in our polarized era, it’s no longer fair to voters for a partisan politician to oversee elections.
There are several options for changing course. For one, the secretary of state could be elected in nonpartisan elections, an idea supported by more than 70% of Republicans and Democrats nationwide. To ensure fairness and functionality, that idea needs supporting guardrails, such as provisions to prevent party insiders from running under the guise of being nonpartisan, as well as ethics requirements.
A bolder and more comprehensive solution is to transfer election oversight from the secretary to an impartial election board, which would appoint a professional, nonpolitical election administrator. (One approach to structuring such a board is explained here.)
In the area of redistricting, Ohio voters increasingly agree that it’s a conflict of interest for legislators to draw district maps and pick their own voters. The same logic holds for elections: It’s a conflict of interest for activists favoring one side to be in charge. All of our peer democracies have rules to keep blatant partisanship out of their elections — rules that help explain why voter confidence is so much higher overseas.
The voters of Ohio have the power to fix this, using the same mechanism their vote protected on August 8. What better way to follow up on the August 8 Issue 1 result than by launching an initiative to permanently de-politicize the position of secretary of state, to make Ohio a national leader in building sensible election systems all citizens can trust?
This piece was originally published in the Ohio Capitol Journal.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.