Robert Sprague,Ohio’s 49th treasurer of state since 2019, previously served as a state representative for the 83rd District and as Findlay’s city auditor and treasurer. He is the Republican nominee for Ohio secretary of state in the Nov. 3, 2026, general election.
Sadly, some politicians view fraud as a cost of doing business. They believe that cheating is inevitable and limited in scope, so it’s easier to look the other way than it is to take fraud seriously.
Case in point: Allison Russo.
As a candidate, Russo claims that Ohio elections are the gold standard, but as a legislator, she voted against virtually every policy that makes elections secure.
She voted against photo ID for in-person voting. She voted against photo ID for mail-in voting.
She
opposes Issue 3 to put photo ID requirements in the Ohio Constitution.
As secretary, Russo will systematically unravel all of Ohio’s policies that keep elections honest.
Fraud is rare, but it is absolutely real.
As Ohio’s secretary of state, Frank LaRose has referred more than1,200 cases of fraud to federal law enforcement and, in the past month alone, has removed 165 noncitizens from our state voter registration list.
If these votes were to be counted, every one of them would have canceled out your vote, and yet Russo opposes the very policies your local board of elections uses to prevent it from happening.
But Russo’s devil-may-care attitude about fraud isn’t limited to voting – it is front and center in where she chooses to work: Kennell and Associates.
According to the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, fraud represents between $100 billion and $300 billion of our nation’s total health care spending each year.
Unfortunately, fraud permeates our entire health care system and impacts every family, every doctor’s visit, every treatment and every medical bill, making health care more expensive for you. Allison Russo continues to receive a paycheck from a company that is part of the problem.
Russo currently serves in a leadership position at the Virginia-based health care consulting company Kennell and Associates.
Russo should quit her job
According to Russo, the company employs somewhere between 20 and 30 people. Most of Kennell’s clients are government agencies, with the largest being the Defense Health Agency, which provides health care to our nation’s servicemen and women, their families and our nation’s veterans.
In light of Kennell’s role in hiding a $300 million errorfrom the government announced in 2024, Russo should resign from the company.
Around 2008, Kennell developed an actuarial formula for Defense Health Agency to reimburse the costs of health care services provided by six health plans that was used between 2008 and 2012. Incredibly, Kennell’s formula was wrong, and as a result, DHA overpaid the health plans by $300 million during that four-year period.
While creating a fundamentally flawed formula for military health care demonstrates profound incompetence, Kennell’s bigger problem arose when it realized its errors in 2012 anddecided not to tell the federal government about them.
It sat on them. It was not until four years later, when two whistleblowers sued under the federal False Claims Act in 2016, that the federal government became aware of Kennell’s error, and, in the interim, taxpayers were soaked for $300 million in fraudulent payments.
If not for the whistleblowers’ suit, who knows if or when Kennell would have alerted the government.
This is fraud. More than a quarter of a billion dollars in taxpayer money was diverted from providing health services to our military men and women and their families, while Russo continues to tout her work at Kennell leading “policy analysis and health services research for Federal government clients.”
This is unconscionable, but it is entirely consistent with her votes and opposition to the critically important policies in Ohio to prevent fraud in our elections.
As state treasurer, I have discretion over what companies can do business with the office, and I would never do business with a company that hid $300 million in fraud from taxpayers.
If Allison Russo cares at all about fraud or affordability, she should resign from Kennell and apologize for her company’s role in this mess.
I have pledged to make our elections the most secure in Ohio history. Throughout my time as state treasurer, in the state legislature, and as an auditor and treasurer in my hometown of Findlay, I have made fraud prevention a top priority. As taxpayers, you deserve nothing less.
As secretary, I will continue to take fraud seriously to ensure that your precious vote counts.
Robert Sprague, Ohio’s 49th treasurer of state since 2019, previously served as a state representative for the 83rd District and as Findlay’s city auditor and treasurer. He is the Republican nominee for Ohio secretary of state in the Nov. 3, 2026, general election.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: My opponent shouldn't be proud of her 9-to-5. She'd quit if she cared about fraud | Opinion
