With two weeks to go before the November vote, Ohio's 88 county boards of elections are managing early voting and getting prepared for election night. But they’re also dealing with residents who are using a state law to challenge other Ohioans’ right to vote based on duplicate registrations in other counties or other states. And in some cases, they're getting deluged with challenges to thousands of voter registrations.
The Wood County Board of Elections in northwest Ohio got one of the biggest challenge - to 16,000 voter registrations, from one person who had filed two much smaller challenges before.
“That represented about 19% of our total voter registration here in the county," said Terry Burton, director of the Wood County BOE.
Burton said the registration challenges are focused on whether voters live in Ohio or another state, based on the registration information found in public records data. It's not illegal to be registered to vote in more than one state, but voting in two or more states is illegal.
Other boards of elections are getting smaller requests, but all asking to determine if the voters live in the county.
"I'm currently going through one that's about 700 voters," said Brian Sleeth, director of the Warren County BOE in southwest Ohio. "A lot of the times it's either clerical error or the voter has transposed numbers and stuff like that. So it's pretty time consuming."
While most challenges are rejected, Sleeth said some duplicate registrations have been discovered. But voters can't be removed from the rolls based on a change of residence unless the voter requests removal. They can also be removed if they don't vote in the next two federal elections and don't respond to a mailed notice from the BOE.
While the trivial ones take time, he said he'd rather spend it this way than holding hearings, where voters need to be subpoenaed as part of the investigation. He noted hearings have been happening in nearby Butler County.
"They've had to hire people to just manage public records requests in their office, and I know it's taking away from them running the election," Sleeth said.
Who's filing these requests, and why?
The challenges are coming from people associated with conservative groups or using public data from those groups to try to find errors.
"What they've said publicly is that they are concerned about, will be registered or on Ohio's voter rolls that aren't eligible to vote on," said Aaron Ockerman, the executive director of the Ohio Association of Elections Officials. "So they've kind of taken it into their own hands to take these individuals out and challenge their eligibility to vote. That's kind of the reason they have put forward."
The deadline for challenges just passed, so no more requests will come in for this year. But for many boards, the challenges have meant extra meetings and more work for elections officials who are already busy with early voting and preparations for the Nov. 5 vote.
"It comes at a stressful time when really our primary focus should be on conducting out of safe, secure and transparent and open and honest selection to the voters in the state of Ohio," said Ockerman.
Boards of elections have gotten challenges to voter registrations before, but for most, those were years ago. And there weren't nearly as many.
“Times have changed. I mean, we never got anything like this four or five years ago," Sleeth said. "No one ever did this."
Boards of elections were overwhelmed with public records requests before the fall statewide vote in 2022. That was just before voting materials from the 2020 election were set to be destroyed 22 months after that vote. Despite no credible claims of problems with the November 2020 vote in Ohio, a conservative podcaster said activists were being urged to request voting records from the 2020 election by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an ally of former president Trump.
