The race for Ohio Secretary of State will be a competitive one this November, with state Rep. Allison Russo winning the Democratic nomination, and Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague winning the Republican nomination Tuesday.

The Associated Press projected Tuesday evening Russo’s victory over oncologist Bryan Hambley and that Sprague had defeated Marcell Strbich.

Russo has served in the Ohio House since 2019, and headed up her legislative caucus as Ohio House Minority Leader from 2022 to 2025.

She pointed to her experience as a lawmaker, and her tenure as part of the Ohio Redistricting Commission, in which she stood in opposition to almost all of the maps approved by the Republican-majority commission.

She voted for the most recent Ohio Statehouse district maps, but she and the other Democrat on the commission, Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, said they approved the maps after being threatened with worse maps by GOP members of the commission. They said they wanted the process to be considered by voters, though the 2024 ballot measure to prevent gerrymandering was defeated.

Having gone through the process, Russo said she’s prepared to “use the bully pulpit” of the Secretary of State’s Office to make changes and act as a “guardrail” against overreach from the legislature or the president.

Hambley was an underdog coming into this year’s Democratic secretary of state primary. A cancer doctor at the University of Cincinnati, Hambley has never held public office, giving voters a potential blank-slate candidate. 

Hambley called Russo to concede around 8:15 p.m. as the race was called.

He said he was proud to endorse Russo as the next secretary of state and her “vision for democracy which returns the power of the vote to the people of Ohio.”

“We lost today because most Democrats in the state of Ohio went to vote and they voted for Rep. Russo’s vision for our state,” Hambley said. “That is exactly how it is supposed to work in a democracy. All of the Democratic ticket, from Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton and Rep. Russo on down, I hope that tonight they ensure they don’t leave any community or county in Ohio behind,” Hambley said.

The overall theme of the campaigns on both sides of the aisle was upholding the integrity of elections, though the means of upholding that tenet differed.

On the Republican side, Sprague’s campaign released ads featuring children’s show-like puppets, zombies, and space aliens, in an effort to emphasize his goal to keep voter fraud away from the ballot box, in a state where the current secretary of state has said fraud is rare.

While Sprague pushed for universal voting machines with a secure paper trail for all votes but defended the state system as strong, Strbich criticized the system as a whole, and called for updated software security systems, pointing to his military security background as evidence of his qualifications.

Every vote cast in Ohio is already documented by either paper ballot or a voter-verified paper audit trail.

Toledo resident Tom Pruss ran on the Libertarian ticket, and received about 1,000 votes.

Sprague and Russo now begin their campaigns for Ohio’s general election Nov. 3.