This volunteer spent a week validating Ohio petition signatures. Here’s what he observed

File photo of petitions being dropped off. (Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal. Republish only with original article.)

The seven-day epic is over. And, having validated signatures on petitions for the Franklin County Board of Elections for a week, I can say that several things stood out.

First, it seems pretty likely that Ohioans will have a chance to vote for redistricting reform in November. Most of my week was filled with validating a flood of petitions for that issue.

Second, I’m not so sure that the Libertarian Party will have candidates on the ballot. More on that below.

Third, it’s fairly obvious that schools don’t teach penmanship any more. Holy cow, you wouldn’t believe the scrawls masquerading as writing.

Yes, it was quite a week. My wife jokingly referred to me as “St. Timothy, Defender of Democracy,” after I described the often grueling, sometimes boring and occasionally entertaining days that I spent with a couple dozen or so volunteers combing through boxes and boxes filled with petitions.

Sitting at desks equipped with PC’s linked to the board’s computerized records, we carefully checked whether the names, addresses and signatures on the paper petitions were solid matches.

Just how solid a match did we need? Well, some petitions had lines in which the name, signature and street names were all okay. But if there was no address number , those signatures didn’t count.

All during the week, I and my fellow volunteers could be heard muttering to ourselves — or asking other volunteers — “Is this an ‘m’ or a ‘b’ or an ‘e’ or what?” We all made strenuous efforts to figure out if each signed line was valid.

On Wednesday, board director Antone White announced that we had earned a treat — ice cream. That was fine, but he might have been even more popular had he handed out earplugs along with the dessert cups. All during the week, construction on an additional room attached to our space meant that we heard more or less continuous beeping. On another day, we enjoyed the additional sound of a jackhammer working on a sidewalk immediately outside the big conference room. But wait! There was more — we also heard a buzz saw that, from the shrieking sounds of it, seemed to be cutting through sheet metal.

On Thursday, a board manager handed out a note urging us to be on the alert for a petition with “a suspicious number of deceased voters.” In the several days that followed, I never ran across that petition, and if any other volunteer did they never made any fuss.

One day in the middle of the week, a fellow volunteer excitedly called out to a supervisor that he thought he had found evidence of fraud. The evidence, he said, was that five people were living in the same apartment.

The supervisor calmly asked if the names, signatures and addresses on the petition all matched the board’s records.

They did.

So, no fraud. Just a bunch of people sharing costs by living in the same apartment.

Every once in a while, I’d pick up a petition and discover that only one line out of 35 had been filled in. The person who had circulated at least some of those petitions was in Akron. I didn’t know what to make of it, since we were only validating signatures from Franklin County residents.

While we moved quickly on the redistricting petitions, we were slowed down when we were pulled away to validate a petition that the Libertarian Party had submitted to get their candidates on the ballot.

To say that there were difference between the two petitions would be an understatement. I found myself saying over and over, “What were these people smoking?” The Libertarian petitions were often illegible — and not just the signatures, which is not unusual. It was the address number and street names, and all the other information that looked like a scrawl instead of block letters. A supervisor walking past my desk joked that “Hey, maybe they had these petitions filled out at Comfest.”

I couldn’t resist replying that I now had the answer to my earlier question — I definitely knew what they were smoking.

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The post This volunteer spent a week validating Ohio petition signatures. Here’s what he observed appeared first on Ohio Capital Journal .