Another trans candidate in Ohio faces disqualification vote for omitting deadname
Another trans candidate in Ohio faces disqualification vote for omitting deadname
A second transgender candidate running for the majority Republican Ohio House could be disqualified from the ballot after omitting her former name on circulating petitions.
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.
Really sounds like we just found some old ass rule on the books and we're using it to discriminate against trans people specifically.
I mean, it makes sense to me. Whether you are trans or not, I feel like people voting for you should be aware if you have changed your name so they can do some googling and make sure you didn't get into any controversy or shenanigans before you changed your name.
Sure they are specifically using this law to target this person because they disagree with their way of life, but it's an old law and was passed for reasons before trans issues were even prevalent so the law itself isn't transphobic.
The discussion around deadnaming and necessary or legal record keeping is kind of ongoing, but that's not what's happening here.
The point of rules like this is to dissuade deceptive name changes but there's no reason to view this particular case as deceptive. That's why it's going up for review and not disqualifying them immediately. Ideally, Congress would recognize this case doesn't fit the spirit of that rule and both allow them to campaign while simultaneously setting a precedent or rewriting the rule to exclude deadnames.
As to whether that'll actually happen, and how fair and impartial the review will be, I think we can all guess it won't be.
It's an understandable rule, but this is dishonest enforcement of it.
But the original law still exempts name change by marriage . To me it feels like name changes not on official public record should be the target, as in a deliberate pseudonym. Still, what fits under that umbrella? Your twitter handle, if it isn't your legal name would fit, but no one included that since the law was written.
The crux of your argument about "make sure you didn't get into any controversy" is baked into the name change process...
A legal name change in the U.S. for any reason other than marriage or divorce typically requires several steps. First, the applicant must file paperwork that includes the reason for the name change and pay filing fees that can be hundreds of dollars. Then the applicant attends a court hearing where they may need to defend the reasons for their name change. If they are granted a court order for a name change, they will need to go through name change processes for other documents such as driver’s licenses and birth certificates, which require additional fees. Many states also require that the applicant pay to publish their name change in the newspaper, with some states requiring multiple publications.
https://uclawreview.org/2021/10/01/name-changes-do-we-need-judicial-discretion/
Ohio in particular is one such a state that requires you to publish the name change in the newspaper
Whether you are trans or not, I feel like people voting for you should be aware if you have changed your name so they can do some googling and make sure you didn't get into any controversy or shenanigans before you changed your name.
Which is what the campaign trail is for. This isn't an application to take a seat, it's a petition to run. Ask yourself how you as a voter have ever interacted with one of these forms.
I understand you aren't defending this action, but theorizing about rational historical uses for this, even uses well outside this incident, only serve to add to the cloud of false rationality that bigots will wrap themselves in to defend this BS.
The old ass rule has a legitimate purpose, but this isn't it.
Ding ding ding!
The one it originally happened to has a father who is a conservative politician in the state and likely wanted to avoid the hit to his own numbers from people knowing about his child.
When people pointed out it wasn't enforced, someone was going to use it for everyone else too
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.
not really. i read into this a bit, and realllly this is people choosing to fight a losing a battle while attempting a war.
this person could have played by [their] rules, and achieved some success in that arena. instead, they chose to not perform due diligence and/or draw a line in the sand preventing any success. they are losing the good through the the chase of perfect.
this is the second person ive seen who is not seeing that they could achieve something big later, if they play by the 'silly' rules now.
if you want to achieve something in government youre going to have to make compromises to get there.
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.
It isn't that they don't want to list previous names it's that the law was buried and not made apparent to the candidate. It wasn't on the candidate requirement guide, the petition has no space for former names, many people weren'teven aware of the law's existence.
While I don't disagree with the law in theory (listing previous names in normal for things like background checks) it's clear this law was dug up specifically to try to disqualify the candidate in bad faith.
The candidate is running as a trans Democrat for District 84. The other case you're referring to is for District 50 which the dems didn't even contest in 2022.
If they played by the rules, they'd have both lost in a landslide and nobody would have noticed or cared. This news story is the best win they could have hoped for.
Selectively enforcing for a certain segment of the population an unadvertised rule is total copshit
Where do you get the idea there's selective enforcement?
I have a feeling she will be successful if they DQ her and she challenges it. Interacting with the bureaucracy of the state we are expected to do what reasonable people would do to comply with the rules and regs, such as follow the directions on the forms provided and follow instructions from officials.
It's unreasonable to expect a person to go digging for extra rules and extra regulations if there is no indication they might exist.
If the form had a place for aliases or prior names, then it would be ok to disqualify anyone who left out a previous name. If there were instructions to provide a list of previous names in a separate document, it would be ok to disqualify. Hell, if the person handing over the document or the website you download it from specifically stated that all previous names shall be disclosed, it would be ok to disqualify.
Most financial documents, for example, specifically ask for that. A lot of government identification applications (passports, drivers licenses, etc) ask for that. So when one encounters a form that doesn't ask for that, there's no reason to suspect that it's necessary.
A good lawyer will have her on the ballot no problem.
Thank you for this reasonable and informed take. A lot of folks up in arms about the identity politics issue, but the real issue is the bureaucracy is not operating in a way that aligns with the law or instructs people to comply. Corrections should be allowed by the candidates and the bureaucracy needs to update procedures.
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I do see a lot of justified Lib hate on here, but a lot of the complaints I have seen on Lemmy have the complainer claiming that they do begrudgingly vote for the dems, despite the criticism. I am not a fan of Biden at all, and I think there are tons of better candidates for the job, but I will still vote for him when I am forced to choose between that and Trump.
Just because people criticize the Dems, doesn't mean that they completely opt out of the voting process.
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At the risk of being dogpiled, I'd like to try to have some discussion on this.
Up front, I want to say that Ohio does a lot of dumb shit, trans rights are human rights, and weaponizing random laws against queer people is bullshit.
It seems clear to me that:
- There is a reasonable motivation for requiring reporting of recent name changes, and the exception for marriage is due to this being extremely common. The article states that this usually came up in the past when people wanted to run with a nickname rather than their given name.
- Not stating this requirement on the form is stupid and bad.
- This is compounded by the lack of a box for a former name, practically guaranteeing that this information is omitted.
- All of this is a problem that should be fixed. The Republic governor has acknowledged this, according to a quote from the article.
What isn't clear to me is that this is selectively enforced against trans people. We only know about the cases where it has happened to trans people because those are the cases that are being reported on. It is not surprising that a cis person encountering a bureaucratic annoyance because they put the name they go by rather than their birth name on the form was not considered newsworthy.
The vibe I get from this is that this is ragebait where the headline invites the reader to jump to conclusions while the contents of the article suggest that this is actually just a stupid case of the government being bad at making a form (something I have personally encountered a lot).
I'm totally fine with being proven wrong, it wouldn't be surprising in the slightest if there is malicious intent here. Is there evidence of selective enforcement here?
Yes there is evidence. Just a few days ago a third trans candidate in Ohio ran into the same problem and their board of elections overturned the rejection during their appeal.
So this year you've had 3 trans candidates with the same problem. 2 upheld and 1 overturned during the appeals process.
Yep. Third bullet point would solve the issue entirely
I agree. This seems like a prime example of a base rate fallacy.
If all 4 transgender candidates ran afoul of this law, and none of the cisgender candidates did, it's reasonable to think that it might be an anti-trans law. But, that ignores the base rate of name changes. Probably about 1% of non-trans people change their names, or use names different from their official names when submitting paperwork to get onto a ballot other than women who take a married name -- but there's an explicit carve-out for that because it's so common. Probably about 99% of trans people change their names or use different names in that same situation. The rate of name changes between the two groups is massively different, so one group is going to encounter the issue much, much more often.
In the past, when trans people simply didn't try to run for office, this wouldn't come up very often, so nobody paid much attention to the badly designed forms, etc. But, now a new group of people is starting to run for office, and this group encounters the problem nearly 100% of the time.
And, while it's also possible to think this might be an old law that's now being weaponized by the other party against trans people, the article shows that they can't do that:
Earlier this month, the board received a protest to Childrey’s ballot certification from Mercer County Republican Party Chairman Robert J. Hibner. Because the ballot is for the upcoming March 19 primary, the board ruled Hibner’s protest invalid, as Hibner is from the opposing political party.
There may still be prejudice at play, that trans candidates are under more scrutiny than a white cis male who wanted to go by Jimbo and not James. But, IMO incompetence / bugs in the system is probably a bigger part of the problem.
Would you make a divorced woman use her ex husband's last name when running for office? Same difference.
That would fall under the exemption due to marriage too, I expect. She should just marry her dog
The point of the law is to prevent things like someone surreptitiously changing their name right before they run for office. E.g. to the same name as another candidate.
It's all about transparency and preventing dirty election tricks. It was probably created long before the current slate of right wing transphobia
A woman who gets divorced and changes her name is exactly the type of situation that could be artificially manufactured in order to swing an election. For example, if she had the same name as a popular candidate/person (even elsewhere in the US!) before she got married.
Hey, Ohio lawmakers: Get Fucked.
Dang whats in the water in Ohio? . . . Oh right vinyl chloride from freight train accidents.
Oh it’s the Ohio legislature I’m sure they’ll follow the law and the will of the people striving to create a fair democratic government. /s
Nah they’re going to tell her no, and possibly make the law stricter because we’re their present target since their attempt to ban abortion was stopped. Oh they may attempt to gerrymander harder too, but that might not be mathematically feasible
Good.
Fuck off.
Rude.