Guest Editorial

Lake Twp. resident questions integrity of Wood County voter rolls

Editor’s note: Taina Romstadt recently went before the Wood County Board of Elections and challenged the eligibility of 112 names on the county’s voter rolls. The board rejected her contentions. She explains her reasons for the challenge in the following guest editorial.

Election officials are provided with handbooks and other resources to do their jobs. There are also directives issued by the Ohio Secretary of State to follow. Some are generally applicable, others cyclical, specific, or special in nature. This seems regimented, yet not all procedures are dictated. Board members do have to apply common sense and critical thinking to make discretionary decisions in order to fulfill their duties within the law. (Ohio Revised Code 3501.08)
It is the law for board members to “investigate and determine the residence qualifications of electors”, “maintain a registration database of all qualified electors” and “remove ineligible electors”. (ORC 3501.11 (Q, T, and U)
The board is also responsible for following an annual Secretary of State directive to complete a process through which ineligible records of voters who moved from Ohio are purged. The process uses the U.S. Postal Service National Change of Address (NCOA) database and requires records to be flagged as “confirmation” status.
That law and directive have been adhered to. Shockingly, the process allows ineligible voter records to remain on rolls at least four years with the same voting rights as “active” status records. The current year process, completed in July, 2024, purged about 158,000 records of voters who moved from Ohio through April, 2020. The records of voters who moved between May, 2020 to the present remain on voter rolls, subject to potential fraudulent use. Sadly, the Wood County board is satisfied with the low standard. (ORC 3503.21 (B) (1 and 2) and Directive 2024-06.)
The same law allows any eligible voter to challenge the eligibility status of another voter by submitting the prescribed Form 257. I submitted 103 forms this summer on June 21 and 112 forms (95 resubmitted) on Aug. 13. I acknowledged it would have been insufficient to submit challenges solely on the basis of NCOA data. My reasons for challenging residency of voters were: they moved, filed an address change with NCOA and registered to vote in the state where they moved and voted there. (ORC 3503.21 (A)(1) and ORC 3503.02 (E and H).
The board insists the burden of proof is the responsibility of challengers but that isn’t the law.
There is no obligation of challengers to provide certified evidentiary documentation for a challenge to be approved. With the help of a team of volunteers, I provided supplemental documentation to assist the board. No Social Security numbers were provided because that data is legally kept from the public. However, full names, addresses, dates of birth, and other data elements were provided to assure accuracy when the board would do its work, using information available to it. Verifiable government data from outside sources was included and the board could have determined voters did not maintain residency status.
Instead, the board failed twice to fulfill its duties by not reviewing information it had or was made available to it.
With the first submission of challenges, a legal hearing was not held. At the hearing for the second submission of challenges, a board member said “statute specifically ties our hands. We cannot remove someone on residency alone.”
This is false. The very law he cited to authorize removal of ineligible voter records under the NCOA process also provides for removal of ineligible records under the voter challenge process. The law is clear. It is not up to the board’s discretion to cherry-pick which law sections it will follow.
The board member also said, “The Secretary of State can promulgate procedures for investigation but he hasn’t done that.” Again, that is cherry-picking from the section pertaining to the NCOA process and not true with respect to the voter challenge process.
The Secretary of State has recently issued directives reiterating a board’s duties to maintain accurate voter rolls. He’s offered examples of methods which “May be necessary to obtain accurate information,” including that the “boards of elections may refer to outside data sources to assist in their research.”
Other county boards of elections are honorably fulfilling their duties. Why is the Wood County Board of Elections opposed to ensuring integrity by maintaining accurate voter rolls?
Taina Romstadt
Lake Township