Ohio GOP candidate in key Senate race uses anti-recording tech to combat ‘trackers’

• Bernie Moreno is hoping to unseat Sen. Sherrod Brown in a race that will help decide Senate control.
• He’s invited event attendees to record him — and recently landed himself in hot water as a result.
• Now, his campaign is deploying anti-recording technology against “trackers” who try to record him.

As he’s campaigned for Ohio’s US Senate seat, Bernie Moreno — the Republican tasked with defeating Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in a race that will help determine which party controls the Senate — has at times explicitly invited attendees at his events to record him.

“You know my rules: Nothing’s off limits,” Moreno said at a town hall event in Warren, Ohio, in late September, in a video seen by BI. “If you want to tape record, videotape anything I say, you’re welcome to do that.”

But Moreno’s campaign has recently begun taking an unusual step to make it much more difficult to capture his words: deploying a gadget that appears to emit an ultrasonic frequency that drowns out audio-recording devices with a strange noise.

In videos and audio recordings provided to Business Insider by the Ohio Democratic Party, staffers for the GOP candidate can be seen holding the device in front of “trackers,” individuals who are employed by campaigns and political parties to follow candidates around and occasionally shout questions.

Moreno’s campaign acknowledged using an anti-recording device in a statement to BI but said the device was only being used against trackers, not regular event attendees.

It’s unclear exactly which device the Moreno campaign is using, but it resembles a microphone jammer available online for roughly $400.

The campaign’s use of the anti-recording device comes after Moreno was surreptitiously recorded at that same town hall in Warren making comments seen as dismissive of suburban women who prioritize abortion when voting.

“You know, the left has a lot of single-issue voters,” Moreno said at the event. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.'”

“It’s a little crazy by the way,” he continued, “but especially for women that are like past 50, I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.'”

Brown has seized on those comments in the weeks since, casting the former car dealer as unsympathetic toward women in a race where abortion looms large. The former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley even weighed in, writing on X: “Are you trying to lose the election?”

In acknowledging the campaign’s use of the device, Reagan McCarthy, a Moreno campaign spokeswoman, took a shot at the Ohio Democratic Party in a statement to BI.

“Maybe if ODP staff carried these around they wouldn’t have been caught calling Ohio voters racist for wanting to close the border,” McCarthy said, referring to a recent surreptitious recording purporting to show one of the party’s staffers blaming “pure racism” for making immigration into a losing issue for Democrats.

It’s fairly commonplace for campaigns in both parties to hire trackers to surveil their opponents, particularly in high-stakes races, in the hopes of catching a slip-up or a gaffe.

For example, the National Republican Senatorial Committee — the campaign committee for Senate Republicans — frequently posts videos online of trackers following Democratic senators and Senate candidates in Capitol Hill hallways, in airports, and at campaign events.

In some instances, candidates and their campaigns have even become familiar with their trackers, posting photos of them on social media to troll their opponents.

But by using technology to prevent recording at his events, Moreno has taken a more aggressive posture toward trackers than other candidates typically do, suggesting a desire to hinder his opponents’ ability to record his statements.