BEVERLY – Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose spoke to students from three area elementary schools about the voting process Tuesday.

Fourth-grade students from Warren Elementary, Waterford Elementary, and Beverly-Center Elementary gathered in the Fort Frye High School auditorium for LaRose’s presentations.

Members from AMVETS Post 1788 handed out copies of the U.S. Constitution to the students.

LaRose started by asking the students what they thought he did as a Secretary of State. One student said he works with voting.

“I’m the Chief Elections Officer in the state of Ohio,” LaRose replied. “I’m in charge of voting. Even though I’m the Chief Elections Officer, I don’t really run the elections. I work with 88 county boards of elections including right here in [Washington] County. It’s the local people in that county that run those elections under the rules that are set by the state legislature and by my office.”

LaRose said two Republicans and two Democrats run each county’s board of elections. He acknowledged while the two parties have had numerous disagreements, each local official is there to perform a civic duty.

“First and foremost, they are patriotic Ohioans,” he said. “Of course, they are proud to be a member of the Republican party and they’re proud to be a member of the Democratic party. But the work they do on elections they know is bigger than party. It’s about making sure every voice can be heard when we have an election.”

LaRose then recalled a survey question he was asked while obtaining security clearance in the Army. It was “Have you ever plotted the overthrow of the government?” He said he thought it was a funny question then, but demonstrated it to the students in a different context.

“Think about this, if you vote in an election for somebody other than the current person holding office, that is a chance to peacefully overthrow the government,” He said. “That’s what an election is. Think about how powerful that is. You think of ballots instead of bullets. We the people can take one group of leaders and say, ‘You’re out of here, go home.’ And we can bring in a whole new group of leaders and change the government using the power of the ballot.”

LaRose told the students this year’s election was about choosing local officials. He said while choosing the President is important, choosing positions like city council and mayor affects a citizen on a local level.

“What probably matters more than who lives at the White House is who works at the courthouse and who works at the school house and who works at city hall,” he said.

LaRose also spoke to the students about honesty in the election process. He described the process election officials go through to verify ballot counts between voting machines and the hard copy ballots they produce.

“Before each election, we test the voting machines. Both Republicans and Democrats run them through their pages to make sure each one is working. Those voting machines can never be connected to the Internet. They’re securely separated from the Internet. We also have a paper copy of every ballot. … We count those ballots electronically on election night. We use the machine to count them up because when we go to bed on election night, we want to know what the results are. We want to know what the decision was, that unofficial count we get on election night. People really want that. But that’s not the final answer. We go back through the paper and we count the hard copies of paper and we compare it to the electronic results,” he said.