Vivek Ramaswamy Voting Rights Ohio

Vivek Ramaswamy Says Ohio Needs Voter ID in Its Constitution to Stop Fraud. His Own 2024 Campaign Turned In Petitions Signed With Dead Voters' Names.

Vivek Ramaswamy pushed Ohio Republicans to put photo ID for voters into the state constitution, and it's on the November ballot. In 2024, Rhode Island election officials found dead residents' names on the nomination papers his presidential campaign submitted, and his campaign confirmed a hired signature-gatherer had forged them on purpose.

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Vivek Ramaswamy Says Ohio Needs Voter ID in Its Constitution to Stop Fraud. His Own 2024 Campaign Turned In Petitions Signed With Dead Voters' Names.
Photo: Jay Waagmeester / Iowa Capital Dispatch, via Rhode Island Current

Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, has made election fraud part of his campaign. In May he said Ohio must write its voter photo ID requirement into the state constitution. A few weeks later, Republican state senators introduced a resolution to do it, and lawmakers sent it to the November ballot, the Ohio Capital Journal reports.

Ohio already requires photo ID to vote, under a law passed in 2022. The amendment would put that requirement into the constitution and, TiffinOhio.net reports, set identity-verification rules for other ways of voting.

But there is a documented case of election fraud in Ramaswamy's own political career, and it came from his own campaign.

Dead Rhode Islanders on his nomination papers

In January 2024, Ramaswamy was running for president and collecting signatures to get on Rhode Island's Republican primary ballot. He needed at least 1,000.

The Rhode Island Current reported what local election boards found:

  • Warwick found the names of several dead residents on Ramaswamy's signature lists, and accepted only 144 of 334 signatures.
  • Providence found at least six names of dead people.
  • Coventry threw out "an unusually high number of signatures."
  • Hopkinton reported a high number of invalid signatures.

The state's deputy elections director emailed local boards of canvassers to warn them.

His campaign admitted it was forgery

Ramaswamy's campaign spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed it. The campaign had hired a Missouri company, GroundGame Political Solutions, to collect signatures in Rhode Island and four other states. GroundGame's own investigation found a worker "intentionally writing down dead people's names on signature forms," the Current reported. The worker was fired, and the company notified Warwick police. The campaign said it had no knowledge of the forgery.

TiffinOhio.net reports that the collector the state flagged was an Ohio woman from Orrville who, according to a Boston Globe review of Ohio court records, had been convicted on 17 counts of forgery in 2007.

At the time, Ramaswamy's campaign slogan was "Truth."

What voter ID would and wouldn't stop

Ramaswamy's argument for the amendment is about trust in elections. But the fraud on his own nomination papers was not a voter showing up at the polls pretending to be someone else, which is what photo ID addresses. It was a paid worker forging names, including the names of dead people, on papers a campaign turned in to get its candidate on the ballot.

Ohio's amendment does nothing about that. It sets ID rules for voters, not for the campaigns and contractors who collect signatures.

The amendment's critics point out that it changes almost nothing. "It's not going to change a single person's life," Ohio House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn said when it passed. "We already have safe and secure and stable elections."

The short version

Vivek Ramaswamy called for putting Ohio's voter photo ID law into the state constitution as a guard against fraud, and the amendment is on the November ballot even though Ohio already requires photo ID. In 2024, election officials in Warwick and Providence, Rhode Island, found dead residents' names on nomination papers his presidential campaign turned in, and his campaign confirmed that a worker for its signature-gathering contractor had written them down on purpose.

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