Last year, several trans candidates for elected office were disqualified because they didn’t disclose their deadnames when filing the paperwork necessary to run for office. One candidate – Vanessa Joy, who tried to run for the Ohio House of Representatives – said she didn’t even know about this requirement.
Now Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has changed the form candidates in the state use to run for office to tell candidates to “include all prior names used in the past 5 years,” outside of those that resulted from marriage.
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This law was used to keep trans people off the ballot. Now it’s being used against a cis Republican.
He didn’t disclose a name change in a state with a strange law about just that.
“The new form does that, and it’s now available on our website for potential candidates to use if they decide to file a candidacy in 2025,” a spokesperson for LaRose told Cleveland.com.
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Last January, Joy turned in the signatures necessary to run as a Democrat for Ohio House District 50, but she was told by the Stark County Board of Elections that she was disqualified because she didn’t follow an obscure state law requiring candidates to disclose any name changes from the previous five years. She said that the requirement wasn’t even mentioned in the forms.
“Something that is that important should have been on the instructions,” she said at the time. “It should have been on the petition.”
She appealed the decision, but the board denied her appeal, saying that the law is “unambiguous.”
Two other trans candidates in Ohio, Bobbie Arnold and Arienne Childrey, had their candidacies challenged under the law but were both allowed to proceed in their respective elections. Another transgender Ohio candidate, Ari Faber, was forced to run under his deadname since he hadn’t legally changed his name yet.
Joy said that she was hopeful that the form change would help other trans candidates running for office but that she has no more plans to run herself.
Democrats and Republicans introduced competing bills in the state legislature to address the issue, but neither passed.
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