CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections found that a local man’s absentee ballot in last month’s presidential election was mailed after he died.
The board on Tuesday voted to refer the case to the Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s Public Integrity Unit to further probe the case.
The ballot was among a handful from the November election that the county elections board singled out for more investigation, representing a minuscule fraction of the more than 571,000 votes cast.
The board caught the discrepancy before it counted the man’s ballot, so his vote was not counted in the initial results, the board’s Deputy Director Anthony Kaloger said during Tuesday’s meeting.
The man, an 83-year-old executive of a textile company who lived in Gates Mills, applied for his vote-by-mail ballot in September, Kaloger said.
The board received his signed ballot, dated Oct. 4, on Oct. 21.
However, the elections elections board staff had already learned that the man died on Oct. 6. The board on Oct. 16 got a monthly report from the Ohio Department of Health with the names and information of every person who died, and compared it with its voter rolls.
The man’s name was on both lists, so his voter status was invalidated and his ballot was counted.
The problem was that the date of his signature, Oct. 4, was four days before the state began mailing out absentee ballots, Kaloger said.
The state mailed its first batch of ballots — which included the man’s — on Oct. 8, making it impossible for the man to have signed it before his death on Oct. 6.
Kaloger also told the board on Tuesday that LaRose’s office had previously referred local elections officials to another potential case of a ballot being cast by a dead person.
However, the board found that the woman was “very much alive” and confirmed that she cast the ballot in question.
Board Director Anthony Perlatti told the board that LaRose’s office, which did not generate the report used to identify the woman, was checking to see if this was an isolated incident or if there was a glitch in their process that could have led to more cases being flagged.
Kaloger also said the county had confirmed a voter who cast a mail-in ballot in Franklin County also cast a provisional ballot in Franklin County on election day.
He said staff is working to get more details about the case and to try to talk to the voter, but would likely ask the board to refer the case to LaRose’s office for more investigation in January.
LaRose, like many Republican politicians at all levels of government across the country, has repeatedly sounded alarms about voter fraud, despite records from his own office showing the phenomenon is incredibly rare.
LaRose blamed the lack of charges — just 12 in the last five years — on local prosecutors’ failure to fully investigate the cases his office referred. Prosecutors rebuked the claim.
One of those cases, which LaRose referred to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, made headlines when Yost held a news conference to tout the indictments of six people for illegally voting in past elections.
One of those people — a Cuyahoga County man — had been dead for two years when Yost asked the grand jury to charge him with voter fraud.
The charges were dismissed after his death was revealed.