County records showed that the woman had never voted in Franklin County.
At the same hearing, Gregory Smith said an official voter-registration acknowledgement had arrived at his Columbus condominium for a stranger. Smith checked with the other residents.
“No one in the building knew the name,” he testified.
The board removed that registration, too.⁴
Those are not imaginary irregularities. Nor should they be waved away.
A false registration card is not harmless simply because it is caught. It wastes public resources, damages trust and may violate the law. A paid canvasser who invents names or addresses to meet a quota should be investigated and, when the evidence supports it, prosecuted.
But a bad registration card is not the same thing as an illegal vote.
That distinction was made by Tony Kaloger, the Republican deputy director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.
Cuyahoga officials had flagged multiple registrations submitted by canvassers working for Black Fork, including forms in the names of dead people and unauthorized changes to voters’ addresses. The board’s two Republicans and two Democrats unanimously referred the cases for investigation.
Kaloger said there was an important difference between a canvasser fabricating cards to satisfy a quota and an organization creating false identities so somebody could cast ballots under those names.
“And we don’t have evidence of that,” he said.⁵
The phrase “voter fraud” is often stretched until it covers several different things.
An inaccurate registration, a dishonest canvasser, an ineligible person on the rolls and an illegal ballot are four different things. One may create an opportunity for another. It does not prove that the next thing happened.
Treating them as interchangeable may be politically useful. It is factually sloppy.
Ohio has seen what can happen when a problem in a registration record becomes a presumption against the voter.
In 2004, Ebony Malone, a recently registered Black voter in Cleveland, learned that her name was on a list of 35,000 predominantly minority Ohioans marked for possible challenges at the polls.
The list had been assembled by sending letters to registered voters in Cleveland neighborhoods with large minority populations and recording the names connected to mail returned as undeliverable.
A piece of returned mail had turned Malone into a suspect.
She went to federal court.
A judge barred the Republican National Committee from using the list to challenge voters, finding that the program violated an existing consent decree and could deter qualified citizens from voting. After emergency appellate proceedings, Malone cast her ballot without being challenged. A later federal court opinion noted that the district court’s factual findings remained undisturbed.⁶
That case and the current FBI investigation are not the same.