By Susan Tebben
Ohio Capital Journal
Republican Frank LaRose claimed victory over Maple Heights Mayor Annette Blackwell in the race for Ohio Auditor Wednesday morning.
“I’m honored and humbled by the opportunity to serve as your next Ohio Auditor of State, but it’s certainly a victory that’s bittersweet,” LaRose said in a statement. “I know we’re disappointed about the outcome of so many other races. We, as Republicans, have a lot of work to do.”
With 102,148 provisional ballots outstanding, and 100% of precincts reporting in unofficial results on the Ohio Secretary of State website, LaRose is winning the race with 2,310,105 votes, or 50.79%, compared to 2,237,955 votes, or 49.21%, for Blackwell.
The Auditor of State is the chief compliance officer for Ohio, conducting performance audits on state entities, local governments like cities and townships, and school districts around the state. The auditor has the power to designate fiscal watches and emergencies for entities who don’t receive clean financial audits. In times when the redrawing of state voting district maps occurs, the auditor has a seat on the Ohio Redistricting Commission as well.
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Democratic Maple Heights Mayor Annette Blackwell leads one of the cities who faced fiscal emergency while current auditor Keith Faber led the office. She said her experience bringing the city back from the emergency gave her perspective she planned to use in leading the office.
Her campaign focused on enhancing the role of the office through the use of recommendations for struggling municipalities, and support for those entities as they go through the audit process.
She also said financial modeling needs to be upgraded to allow the state and it’s local governments to better predict their future under lower support from the local government fund, and tax incentives brought in to appeal to industries like data center developers and other large companies.
Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose campaigned for the move to auditor on a platform of accountability, affordability, and transparency. As part of his plan for office, he pledged both to harness the power of artificial intelligence for use within the auditor’s office, and to keep watch over AI’s potential to cause problems for local governments and the agency itself.
He acknowledged public trust in governmental institutions is “at an all-time low,” and pushed for more programs to identify public corruption, including an “Ohio Taxpayer Fraud Bounty Program” to encourage public reports of corruption.