Lorain County elections workers struggling with requests for 1 million records

SHEFFIELD TWP. — An onslaught of requests seeking the release of an estimated 1 million documents are burying Lorain County Board of Elections workers, with more coming in every day. Director Paul Adams, a Democrat, said his office is receiving three to five requests each day for documents related to 2020 elections, financial paperwork going back to 2016, "and basically looking at everything in-between." They seek access to ballots, poll book data, provisional ballot envelopes, contracts and even obscure voting machine reports that Adams said his office has never even run. The requests seem to be aimed at preventing those documents from being destroyed. Some records, such as detailed precinct-by-precinct voting breakdowns, must be kept forever. Most, though, can be destroyed after 22 months under federal law. Those documents are handed over to the Lorain County Records Retention Center for disposal on a regular schedule, said Marilyn Jacobcik, a Republican who chairs the Lorain County Board of Elections. Elections officials have a lot of experience providing records under Ohio law. "In this case, it has been overwhelming for us, and likely across the country as people have been bombarded with this mass number," Adams said. The requests are being received at crunch time, as county workers focus on preparing for the Nov. 8 election. Ballots must be sent by the end of next week to overseas and military voters. The situation here fits a trend reported across the nation in recent weeks, especially in states that were battlegrounds in the 2020 presidential election. Mike West, spokesman for the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, laid the problem at the feet of election denier Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow. Lindell has toured extensively, hawking a string of election fraud theories since President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump in 2020. He even appeared at the Lorain County Fairgrounds in June 2021, touting "stop the steal" rhetoric. But despite promising proof of widespread election fraud that he believes undermined the election, Lindell has not been able to deliver. At his "Moment of Truth Summit" last month in Missouri, he asked followers to make mass record requests at elections boards nationwide. West said they are doing so at "all 87 other" counties in Ohio, draining resources as workers prepare for the fall midterms. Adams said records requests appear to be copied from a single source, bearing identical language. The website for Ordros Analytics, a company some media outlets have linked to Lindell's efforts, has sample language it asks people to use to make such requests. It claims to have received voting record files from all over the United States in response, including 41 from Ohio. Adams said he cannot tie the records requests he's received to any one group. While some have been delivered by hand or postal mail, most have been received by email and under Ohio law don't have to include the sender's name. But Jacobcik said there "seems to be a lot of evidence" that a large number of records requests are the result of Lindell's urging, though she questions why, since Trump won the Ohio vote. The state has proven time and again to have some of the most protected elections in the country, she said. Every step in the process must be undertaken by Republicans and Democrats working in tandem to prevent partisan meddling, she said. That across-the-aisle effort also helps find voter irregularities. Six people were referred to the county prosecutor's office for investigation after the November 2020 election, Adams said. The Lorain County elections board itself has nothing to hide, no sinister secrets to safeguard, according to Jacobcik: "I think we have a reputation in the state among elections people who know what's going on, we have a reputation for the highest integrity," she said. From time to time in the past, there have been challenges that required the board to produce documents, but nothing ever on this scale, Jacobcik said. "I have to feel that some of the people doing this, making the requests, are doing so in good faith because they've been maybe led to believe there are issues that simply don't exist," she said. But those requests are putting a strain on local elections workers, she said. Regardless, there is a legal obligation to respond to each and every one, even if they are identical. Some of the documents being requested "we can and should supply," Jacobcik said. "Others may not be." State law allows records requests that are "overly broad" to be denied. In his opinion, many of the ones he's been getting fit that bill, Adams said. He said the board of elections is working with Lorain County Prosecutor JD Tomlinson's office to determine whether that's legally the case, however. "We're going to do everything correctly, and we're going to work with our legal counsel to make sure we provide the records that we need to and we do it in the proper fashion," Adams said. The other part of the equation is the time it takes to redact private information that under the law cannot be shared. For example, sometimes voters — just to be sure — will put their full Social Security numbers on forms, Adams said. But he can't hand those documents over without first being checked and then that information blacked out. Nor can records disclose who residents voted for. Ballots remain secret. "It will all work out, I'm sure. It's just a lot of headaches right now," Jacobcik said. Reporter Jason Hawk can be reached at (440) 329-7122 or news@lcnewspapers.com.