A second transgender candidate running for a seat in the Republican-majority Ohio House is at risk of being disqualified from the ballot after omitting her former name on circulating petitions.
The Mercer County Board of Elections is set to vote Thursday on whether Arienne Childrey, a Democrat from Auglaize County and one of four transgender individuals campaigning for the Legislature, is eligible to run after not disclosing her previous name, also known as her deadname, on her petition paperwork.
A little-used Ohio elections law, unfamiliar even to many state elections officials, mandates that candidates disclose any name changes in the last five years on their petitions paperwork, with exemptions for name changes due to marriage. But the law isn’t listed in the 33-page candidate requirement guide and there is no space on the petition paperwork to list any former names.
I’m going with Hanlon’s Razor on this one and assuming this is just a really stupid bureaucratic failure where a form doesn’t have a box for required info that it doesn’t tell you is required. Curious if there are similar examples for name changes by cis people, which I wouldn’t expect to be newsworthy. Regardless it needs to be fixed.
Believe me, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case, and I 100% think this is wrong.
My take here is that filling out a government form and having it be rejected because you didn’t put required information that isn’t stated as required into a box that the form doesn’t have and getting denied/made to redo it is an extremely plausible scenario. In the case of a cis person being denied this way, it’s a mundane bit of bureaucratic nonsense that nobody would blink an eye at.
The article states:
The law has been in place in some form for decades, though it’s rarely been used and usually arises in the context of candidates wishing to use a nickname.
The fact that this law has been identified as a real problem for trans people and that there is a quote in the article from the (Republican) governor saying “this is bad, we should fix it” strikes me as acknowledgement that this dumb rule is disproportionately affecting trans people and should be fixed.
We have a depressing number of real examples of malicious use of the law against trans people, so all I’m saying is that this one doesn’t seem worth getting fired up about unless there is evidence of actual malicious intent here.
