Ohio voter advocates warn group is making troubling challenges

The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.

Voting rights advocacy organizations are calling on the Ohio Secretary of State to create consistency within the county boards of elections when it comes to voter registration challenges.

The urgency comes in particular because of one group, the Ohio Election Integrity Network, which advocates say has been approaching multiple Ohio counties with lists of hundreds of voters they say are ineligible to vote in Ohio and should be removed from rolls. The way in which they are approaching county boards goes against the existing process of maintaining voting rolls, elections advocates say.

“Really all of it is centered around poking holes in the election systems and the processes we’ve been using,” said Kelly Dufour, voting and elections manager for Common Cause Ohio.

“Troubling challenges” are playing out in multiple counties because of the OEIN and similar groups, according to Common Cause Ohio, impacting the way in which board of elections are able to move forward with election processes, and spotlighting the varied resources and workloads each county has.

“We know election officials have a critical role to play, but they’re already playing it,” Dufour said in a press briefing on Wednesday. “They don’t need outside interference trying to lighten their load.”

She said she watched a voter challenge hearing in Hamilton County that lasted more than an hour. The subject of the hearing was a 34-year-old doctor who was matched by her medical school to work in Kentucky, but still shared a residence with her mother in Ohio.

“I watched her be cross-examined by an attorney as she defended her housing choices, her employment choices,” Dufour said, adding that she was asked what jobs she’d turned down as well.

Advocacy groups were also alerted to OEIN approaching the Licking County Board of Elections with “hundreds” of voter registration challenges through a news article by The Reporting Project .

At a public comment period during the Montgomery County Board of Elections’ July 9 meeting , Scott Taylor identified himself as a member of a “research team” in the county for the OEIN, and made a presentation about more than 50 voter registration challenges being made by the group in the county. He asked for a timeline on when the challenges would be dealt with.

Board director Jeff Rezabek was the first to speak after Taylor’s presentation, and started off by saying he found it “absolutely disingenuous of Scott to come before the board and throw these questions out there.”

“He knows these answers,” Rezabek said.

The director said they had spoken through phone calls and “several” emails, and he had explained that the voters would need to be notified of the challenge and allowed to provide proof of residency or allowed to confirm they were no longer Ohio residents.

He told the board that the data provided by the OEIN was only through the year 2022.

Rezabek said he was also waiting for the already in-process change of address verification to work its way through the system, to see if any of the names were removed automatically.

“Anybody that is not removed from the current purge process, we will be having a hearing for and I think that’s what required of the law under the spirit of the law,” Rezabek told the board.

Common Cause of Ohio, the ACLU of Ohio, and the All Voting is Local’s Ohio chapter — combining to call themselves the Ohio Voter Rights Coalition — came together in a letter to Secretary of State Frank LaRose asking him to guide the local boards in their interactions with these groups.

“It is our assertion that this process that Ohio EIN is implementing is actually circumventing the process of voter challenges,” Kayla Griffin, state director for All Voting is Local, said in the Wednesday press call.

The letter calls on LaRose to “issue a directive to summarily ignore voter flags from private groups” that do not follow provisions in Ohio law, including the cancellation procedure that voters can only be removed after a challenger has signed a form “under penalty of election falsification” and after notification of the actual voter.

Advocates at the press briefing and in the letter to LaRose criticized the departure of the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) , a system used by multiple states to share data from motor vehicle registration departments to verify voter addresses.

“In the absence of (ERIC), the Secretary of State’s Office has created a void in our system which has allowed an unauthorized private group to swoop in and conduct a function that belongs to the state,” the letter from voting rights groups stated.

According to their website, OEIN supports House Bill 472 , a GOP-sponsored bill still sitting in the Ohio House Homeland Security Committee which would require that an elector have a state ID or driver’s license in order to vote and would also require election officials to compare an elector’s photo ID with “the elector’s appearance or with a photo on file, and if they do not match, to challenge the elector’s right to vote,” according to the bill.

Neither the Secretary of State’s Office nor the OEIN responded to requests for comment from the Capital Journal.