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Every child deserves more at OHEA.org.

The state's gender affirming care ban for minors could get stuck in court.

More felony indictments for former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder.

And a conversation about the behind the scenes with an election official.

Post-primary all this week in the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Sara Donaldson in for Karen kasler.

Less than a month before House Bill 68 was set to become law, the ACLU of Ohio has sued the state over the legislation in a Franklin County court.

It seeks to block the gender affirming care ban for trans minors from going into effect on schedule and at all.

The suit is filed on behalf of 212 year old trans girls and their families, one from the Cincinnati area and the other from Columbus.

In the filing, they argue that HB 68 goes against the Ohio Constitu mission by breaking a single subject rule for legislation and by being discriminatory, among other claims.

Free to Levenson is the ACLU of Ohio Legal Director.

Levinson told me this Tuesday afternoon.

The ban is.

Cruel.

It's not.

Based on science.

And it's unconstitutional.

Governor Mike DeWine vetoed the bill late last year, but almost all GOP lawmakers broke with him and voted to override that in January.

That includes Representative Gary Click, a Republican who was instrumental in its passage.

Clicks not worried about the litigation.

I mean, I think they're going to give it their best shot.

I don't think that they stand much of a chance.

HB 68 bars physicians from prescribing hormones and puberty blockers to minors and creates penalties for those who do.

It also requires K through 12 and collegiate teams in Ohio to be single sex and enables athletes to bring forth civil lawsuits against any institution that violates that mandate.

At the same time, state agencies are considering a set of administrative rules on transition treatments and other care for trans kids.

The proposed rules by both the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services and the Ohio Department of Health are entirely independent of the new law.

They came at DeWine's request when he vetoed it.

Under some of the changes being considered.

Doctors and other health care givers could only diagnose and treat transgender patients in contract with an integrated care team of physicians and psychiatrists.

In February, UMass issued revised rules clarifying they would only affect minors and extending what professionals could serve on the care team.

Still, during a hearing earlier this month, a dozen LGBTQ advocates and social workers testified against them.

Kim Ogden, a fellow with equality Ohio, said she still has big concerns about the final version.

The Department of Health and the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services is currently treating trans people.

Like we're a public health threat, right?

That's that's what these rules seem like they're meant to address.

But transgender people are not a public health threat, and we don't need to be addressed that way.

Micah Mitchell is with Trans Ohio.

They say the state's trans community is tired of testifying so often.

I think this goes to show how resilient we are that no matter how many hearings we have to go to, no matter how many administrative rules or laws they try to propose, we will be here testifying in opposition because this is.

Incredibly.

Harmful to our communities.

A jury convicted Republican Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder on federal charges a little more than a year ago for his role in the House Bill six nuclear power plant bailout scandal.

Now householder is facing state charges, too.

Attorney General Dave Yost announced the ten felony indictments this week, which include charges of theft in office, telecommunications fraud and money laundering.

Federal charges take priority over state charges and those landed householder 20 years in prison.

But he's appealing that sentence.

A conviction on one of these charges would disqualify Householder from running or holding public office again.

In prepared remarks, you said this is the natural next step in the process.

A conviction on state charges in state court for theft in office means the comeback kid will never come back to the General Assembly.

The investigation came at the request of the Summit County prosecutor.

The Ohio Supreme Court will decide in the coming months whether pharmacies created a public nuisance through how they distributed legal prescription drugs.

Walgreens, CVS, Pharmacy and Wal-Mart are questioning whether state law even permits the public nuisance claim.

Justices heard oral arguments in the case this week.

It stems from a lawsuit filed by Trumbull and Lake counties over the opioid epidemic, one of thousands nationwide.

A trial court sided with the counties, ordering the defendants to shell out $650 million.

It's going through the federal appeals process, but the state's highest court got involved over this technical question.

Attorney Jeffrey Wall argued on behalf of the pharmacies that the lawsuit should fall under product liability, not public nuisance.

Otherwise, Wall says.

And you can sue gun manufacturers for the public nuisance of violence.

Energy companies for climate change, fast food lead paint and all the rest.

But attorney David Frederick argued on behalf of the counties that painkillers and the way that they're prescribed are unique.

The reason for the suit.

We're in such an unusual territory.

Generally, the court releases decisions 3 to 6 months after cases are heard.

With the dust from primary election night largely settled, my statehouse news bureau colleague Joe Ingles sat down with Lorain County Board of Elections Director Paul Adams to talk the behind the scenes after the polls close.

Adams is the newly elected leader of the Ohio Association of Election Officials.

I wanted to ask you about election night.

What goes on behind the scenes at boards of elections, local boards of elections on that night?

So on Election Day, there's an awful lot of things that are going on.

Most people know that we have a large over poll workers at work during the day, but there's an awful lot of workers at boards of elections throughout Ohio that are helping receiving all those returns.

So as all of the polling places return, they're coming back in teams of Democrats and Republicans.

We have teams of Democrats and Republicans that review all of the equipment and memory sticks, ballots, everything that's coming back, recording sealed numbers, making sure that all that information that's coming in before we tabulate anything, all matches and everything's been verified before it is tabulated and we start releasing reports.

That sometimes takes a little while and sometimes people are questioning, well, closed polls close at 730.

Why don't we see a report up immediately?

Well, we're doing all of those checks to make sure that what we are reporting is accurate and has been provided to us securely.

So you do the checks on everything.

Then you tabulate what typically and all the different boards of elections are doing this process a little differently, right?

That's correct.

Every board of elections in the state of Ohio has the ability to choose their own system.

So some counties, such as my neighboring county, Cuyahoga, they use all paper.

Some counties like mine in Lorain County, same here in Franklin County, use a hybrid system where voters vote on a touchscreen, but they also have a paper ballot that's printed out.

Other places are completely touchscreen, which we call dry.

All of those have different types of media that come back to the boards of elections that all have to be reviewed.

So there's different processes, but all of those processes involve a Democrat or Republican team confirming that everything is being provided is accurate.

Now, do all the local boards of elections have electronic reporting?

Can you go to all counties, all 88 counties, and look at their board of elections and see what's coming in in that county on election night?

Yes, you do.

You every county has that.

So some county websites are better than others.

Some counties have a little more resources than other counties.

But everybody posts all of those results as they come in election night on their local Board of Elections website.

Is there any universal effort to get all of the boards of elections to try to post the outcome that the reelect election results a certain way?

One way?

Well, in terms of one way, we we provide all of the reports when it comes to statewide elections.

Really, the best way to find that information is through the secretary of state's website.

They will post results there.

We all have individuals that update our secretary of state systems so that there are accurate numbers provided to the state.

Because if you're looking at a state race, what you might see in Lorain County is not necessarily what's going to be reflective statewide.

So really, the state has done a good job of taking all the different types of systems, having a report up to the state and then it being posted at the state level.

There's an aggravation, though, among people who are watching the results come in.

They're saying, you know, it's slow, it takes a lot of time.

And meanwhile, they're watching national networks that, you know, can get these outcomes a whole lot faster.

What about that?

So I would say two things about that.

First off, our role as election officials is to be accurate, not necessarily fast.

We move as quickly as we can, but our our number one goal is to be accurate on election night.

Nobody wants to release results and then have to retract them or have some kind of error that was posted.

We want to make sure that we're doing the accurately so that takes precedence over the speed.

But the part of it, when people talk about, well, I see a network has posted some results.

We see this both at the national and local level.

One of the things that's in Ohio law is that all polling locations have to post election results at that polling location before those poll workers leave.

So sometimes you'll hear somebody say, I just went by the polling location and there's a tape up there was that election materials that were left?

No, what's required?

We leave and all the polling locations across the state, a list of how that polling location voted before the the poll workers leave.

So local campaigns and some of the larger media networks like the Associated Press, they will have people go out, they call them stringers.

They'll go out to some of these locations.

So there will be some cases to where on election night, the local Associated Press or a local candidate that may be looking for their own races, they may have already went out to a handful of the polling locations, looked at those tapes, and they already know the numbers of how people voted that polling place.

Even before I know and the like I said, the Associated Press and some of those larger press entities, they do that.

So there are looking at those numbers before they've even come to us.

And that's how they can get some of those numbers.

Wow.

So a lot of big media, though, have invested a whole lot of money to find out things that the rest of us learn later.

You know what you just described?

They pay for those stringers, I'm sure that they seem to have the information on numbers of eligible voters who voted and early vote information that's not available to everyone else.

Is there any effort underway at the local levels to try to get that information out faster to voters.

So some county board of elections, depending on their local resources they have, like I said, do a really good job with their websites.

We have options on our website for you to see early vote numbers.

Some boards of elections, larger boards of elections even show turnout during the day.

So you can see 10:00 in the morning, what is turnout?

But part of that issue is the local funding.

If a local board of elections only has a director or deputy director, maybe a couple of staff members, they might not have somebody.

They can maintain a website such as that.

And that's something that over as time goes on, we're probably going to get more people involved in that and more people that are comfortable updating a website.

But right now, that is kind of the thing that holds us up is just having experience and then having people that have the counties that have the funding to pay for somebody.

They can update a website at that level.

And I would imagine in smaller counties you would be less likely to have those people.

So is that kind of like fair really, that these smaller counties don't have the ability to do what some of the larger counties can?

Right.

So I'm from a larger county.

If but also part of our association are smaller counties.

And they would be the first ones to scream absolutely.

That there are cases, too, where smaller counties are at a disadvantage because they don't have the funding that's available than some of the larger counties do.

So where do you see local boards of elections making improvements in the future?

What can be done?

So I think I think part of the things that can that can help local boards of elections is improving education of our local election officials.

Since 2020, there's been a significant turnover in election officials, not just here in Ohio, but across the country.

So we have a large number of new members filling up our ranks.

And I think one of the one of the duties, I believe, of our association of election officials is to properly educate the newer incoming election officials and give them training courses and allow them those tools by training to assist them in being better, communicating within their local communities.

And that would involve things such as websites as well.

Now, do you run into the poll workers who maybe have worked a thousand years at the polls there, there every year, and they're maybe a little resistant to training.

Do you run into that?

We have had some of that in the past.

I think a lot of the individuals that are kind of resistance as poll workers to additional training are we've lost those along the way.

After everything that happened in 2020, the implementation of new voting equipment over the last four or five years in most counties in the state of Ohio, those individuals that are maybe a little more stuck in the mud of this is how I've done it for 40 years.

Those individuals have kind of moved on now, and we've been kind of replaced.

Yeah.

And I remember they used to have like, potlucks at some of the boards of elected precincts.

Yeah.

And some of them still do.

They still do.

Okay.

So that's allowed.

Yes.

Okay.

So what are you allowed to give people standing in line?

What do you allow allowing groups to give people?

Can they give them a bottle of water?

Can they provide entertainment?

Can they give them a slice of pizza?

What what's allowed in Ohio law?

And does that vary from location to location?

So when it comes to the ethics of that, that is across the state.

That is an ethics rule across the state of Ohio.

Number one, you cannot provide anything, whether it be in line or any place to anybody, something of value, trying to encourage them or discourage them to vote or vote for a particular candidate or issue.

So if you have somebody that is handing out pizza someplace and says, well, I'm going to give you a piece of pizza, if if you vote and if you vote for candidate A or you vote against this levy or you vote for this levy, that is unethical and that is illegal.

And boards of elections in the past have had to intervene in those cases a kind of carte blanche.

You know, here's the availability to anybody that's not encouraging.

Discourage rigging.

Forcing someone to vote one way or another would potentially be acceptable.

But once again, you have to go back to the question of is it being done to encourage somebody giving them something of value.

And over the years, it's even been as far as I've had to contact some different school districts over the years where we find out maybe they're providing some type of extra credit to students who show that their parents voted, well, that's something of value.

So that's not permissible either.

Yeah, I know.

A local board of elections, the last one of the last elections had root beer floats, but the signage for that was for a particular issue candidate kind of thing.

So that would be something that wouldn't be.

Allowed, correct?

Okay.

Okay.

So what are the biggest preparations that boards of elections have to make heading into this general election, particularly a presidential election?

yeah.

There's an awful lot of things I've a lot of things that we need to take into consideration.

I would say, you know, one of the biggest things that we don't normally look at, at least on the scale that we're going to be looking at for the November election, is going to be proper staffing.

Boards of elections in our county, we have approximately 35 regular staff members back in 2020, there was almost 180 people working in our building just at our Board of Elections.

Boards of elections across the state of Ohio are going to greatly expand with individuals who are going to come in and assist with a lot of paperwork, a lot of processing that's happening at the local Board of Elections office, and that is a challenge when you're trying to go through, make sure that first off, that you can find those people, because right now it's not the best job market to find a whole large number of people that just so happen to be available for 40 or more hours a week, just so happen to be available for only 2 to 3 months that we need them and are really, really good people.

So that is definitely one of the big things that we're looking at as well is just disaster planning, contingency planning, making sure that all of your contingency plans are already well thought through so that if something happens on Election Day, you can have a plan that you can fall back on and immediately implement.

Are you concerned that among some people there seems to be a general mistrust in the election process and and how are you dealing with that at the local level?

I think all election officials are greatly concerned about the mistrust that I think we see all across the country.

Some election officials that have been around for a little while have seen ebbs and flows of this.

I started in elections back in 2003 after the 2004 presidential election.

There was a lot of mistrust here in the state of Ohio particularly.

And I think election officials at the time spent an awful lot of time educating voters, educating people in the community.

And that helped us get through that.

And I think that's what's going to be needed at this time, that it is a responsibility for local election officials to add another hat to all of their duties, and that is to be out in the community explaining to people these are the processes, this is how this works.

And a lot of local boards of elections are already working with their local media to make sure that they can get out the proper information.

These are the security procedures we have in place.

These are these steps that are that occur because we have so many people that just assume if they don't hear anything from us, then it's easy to assume all these different kind of things could happen if they hear you're out in the community.

While we're hearing X, Y, and Z is happening in.

If we're not speaking up as election officials, then that allows that to become more rampant.

Is that going to solve the problem completely?

No, it's not unfortunate, Ali.

There are some people that it's very difficult to have that conversation with.

But I think it's our job as election officials to talk to as many people as we can and make that group of skeptics as small as possible.

What can the state and the secretary of state's office do to make your job easier to make it effective at the local level?

What I've seen so far, and I think this will just continue and needs to expand is the secretary of state's office has worked very hard on pushing social media, making sure that when there are false claims that come out of immediately posting on social media at the state level debunking those myths and immediately responding, this goes back to our earlier conversation about how some smaller boards of elections have difficulties just because of the size of their office.

If you have a small board of elections someplace and they are now subject to some social media conspiracy theory, that is clearly wrong, they might not have the ability to immediately respond.

And that's something, too, where the secretary of state's office in the past, but also leading into this November election, I hope it ramps up its ability to immediately respond to those and spread out to a large audience very quickly.

No, this is wrong.

These are the actual facts.

Governor Mike DeWine announced that Indian Lake State Park will welcome visitors again starting this weekend.

Ahead of the summer season.

Two weeks ago, heavy storms hammered much of the Midwest, including Ohio, wreaking havoc on homes, electric lines and trees.

Several tornadoes touched down here, including a destructive EF3 in Logan County that killed three Ohioans.

The state park was just one part of the community in the path of the twister, which traveled more than 30 miles.

Park manager Heidi Whitman told the Statehouse news bureau that staff, alongside hundreds of volunteers, have been busy since working to clear litter and debris on the land and in the water.

The news comes at a time that normally wouldn't be bustling for the 800 acre park, but it is fully booked by campers at the start of the month.

Indian Lake is one of a dozen state parks in the path of the coming solar eclipse.

DeWine says Fox Island will remain closed for the time being because of extensive damage, including a destroyed shelter house.

After the tornadoes.

He declared a state of emergency in 11 counties where he also requested the Federal Emergency Management Agency assessment.

And some sad news to share.

Brigid Kelly, the former Hamilton County auditor and Democratic state lawmaker, died late Tuesday after her cancer diagnosis two years earlier.

She was 40.

State and local political figures on both sides of the aisle from Republican Governor Mike DeWine to Democratic Minority Leader Allison Russo lauded her online as a principled public servant.

Her family said in a statement She died at home, surrounded by love and peace.

DeWine ordered flags to half staff starting Wednesday through Kelly's funeral.

That's it for this week.

For my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our Web site at State News dot org or find us online by searching state of Ohio.

Show.

You can also hear more from the bureau on our new podcast, The Ohio State House Scoop.

Look for it every Monday morning wherever you get your podcasts.

And please join us next time for the state of Ohio.

Support for the Statehouse news bureau comes from medical mutual dedicated to the health and well-being of Ohioans offering health insurance plans as well as dental, vision and wellness programs to help people achieve their goals and remain healthy.

More at Med Mutual Rt.com.

The Law Offices of Porter Wright Morrison, Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at Porter Wright AECOM.

Porter Wright inspired every day.

The Ohio Education Association representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools.

Every child deserves more at OHEA.org.