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  • Newark Advocate

    Licking County Elections Board clarifies relationship with Ohio Election Integrity Network

    By Alan Miller,

    3 hours ago

    https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1Izk6B_0utkhcIp00

    The Licking County Board of Elections responded this week to concerns about an organization that asked the board to cancel registrations for voters who the organization said it believes are registered to vote in two states.

    Board of Elections Director Brian Mead told the board Monday that its response to requests by the Ohio Election Integrity Network had been misunderstood by some people who responded with harsh and unfair criticism.

    Mead and board members Dave Rhodes and Kaye Hartman were particularly upset that some people perceived their willingness to listen to Network representatives and accept information from them as “collaborating” with or turning over board duties to an outside organization.

    “This board has always made decisions based on the best interests of the voters of Licking County,” Hartman said, adding the board viewed the requests and information the Network provided the same as it would any others that come from the public.

    Mead said he felt like “we were made a pawn in an effort to push the secretary of state” to take action regarding the Network’s activities in Ohio.

    A June 12 story by The Reporting Project reported that at the same time the state was considering removing 2,185 inactive Licking County voters from the rolls in a controversial process of “cleaning up” the registration list, the Network was asking the board to consider removing 292 people who the network’s leaders said were registered to vote in Licking County and in another state.

    Mead said that some people conflated those two things and thought the Network was asking the board to remove more than 2,000 Licking County voters from the rolls.

    The 2,149 Licking County voters ultimately removed from the rolls were affected by a state-mandated review of registrations to remove voters who have moved and not updated their registration or have not voted during the past four years. The Licking Countians were among 154,995 inactive Ohio voters removed in July.

    The state gave voters on its list a chance to update their registrations, and 3,862 did so, including 36 from Licking County. Those who were purged or have not yet registered to vote have until Oct. 7 to register if they want to vote in the Nov. 5 presidential election. To see whether you were purged, visit the Ohio Secretary of State’s website, registrationreadiness.ohiosos.gov .

    The Network’s request to remove voters from the Licking County rolls was not automatically granted. Instead, the Elections Board voted twice this year to review data the Network obtained that suggested some voters might be registered in two states.

    Board chair Freddie Latella and member Hartman, who are Democrats, and Republican Rhodes voted in June to accept Network information indicating 292 people were registered to vote in Licking County and in another state and to send them letters asking them to pick a state and sign a form canceling their Ohio registration if they intended to vote elsewhere in the future. Republican Park Shai was absent from the June meeting and from the Monday’s meeting.

    Earlier this year, Mead said, the board sent letters to 250 people, and 77 of them sent back forms requesting the county remove their registrations from the voter rolls. And 59 from the second group of 292 sent back forms requesting removal.

    The Ohio network uses materials and data generated by the national Election Integrity Network, led by Cleta Mitchell, an election attorney who, after former President Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020, was part of a legal team in Georgia that sought to reverse the 2020 election results there and across the country. Mitchell was on the phone call when Trump asked the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” he would need to give him a win in that state.

    The Network operates in about two-thirds of Ohio’s 88 counties, according to Vicki McKinney, an Ohio Election Integrity Network board member from Johnstown and a member of the group’s Licking County Task Force.

    After the June board meeting, the League of Women Voters of Licking County questioned the relationship between the Network and the local elections board and about where the Network gets data it uses to ask about registrations. And three other organizations — the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, Common Cause Ohio and All Voting is Local Ohio — held a news conference in Columbus and asked Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose in a July 11 letter to “take appropriate steps to safeguard the voting rights of all eligible citizens by issuing a directive to county boards on list management that ignores private entities that call into question their fellow voters.”

    The Licking County Board of Elections approved a letter Monday responding to the League of Women Voters, saying, in part: “We’d like to first address one serious concern we have, and that is the characterization of our interactions with the OEIN as ‘collaborating,’ ‘working with,’ and ‘use (of) a private organization’ to do the work of board staff. Their initial request was for the Licking County Board of Elections to outright cancel the registrations of 248 voters they brought to us. The director and deputy director immediately and flatly refused to do this, as it would have constituted actually collaborating with an outside agency to remove voters without due process.

    “After further discussion,” the letter says, “the directors suggested that the OEIN ask the board to send a letter to the voters listed, asking them if they had moved out of state, and if so, to please cancel their Licking County registration” by signing an enclosed form and returning it.

    The board said it was “satisfied that we would be able to identify any voters erroneously included in their (OEIN) list before mailing the letters, which we did by cross-referencing their list with our most current registration information.”

    The board referred the League to OEIN for answers to questions about its data collection methods.

    Alan Miller writes for TheReportingProject.org , the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers .

    This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Licking County Elections Board clarifies relationship with Ohio Election Integrity Network

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