A transgender woman running for an Ohio House seat has been disqualified for failing to disclose her former name on petitions circulated to voters, in violation of a seldom-enforced state law.
Local election officials informed Vanessa Joy, who hoped to run as a Democrat for Ohio House District 50, that she was not eligible to do so, despite having collected the signatures necessary to run.
Joy sought to run in a firmly Republican district covering Stark County, just south of Akron.
The law doesn’t apply to changes due to marriage.
There probably aren’t too many others who have had a name change.
If the reason for this law is to not have someone change their name to hide some negative past from voters, a marriage name change is still just as concealing. Sally Smith to Sally Michaels when there are thousands of Sally’s out there is just as much hiding as anything else.
Honestly, it’s really not. It’s rather trivial to find marriage records to find the original name.
Maybe it’s the same for legal name changes, I don’t know. I’ve never searched for it before.
But anytime I’ve had to find out someone’s maiden name, it’s been trivial for me to do so.
It is, I’ve done it. Any form of name change is just as easy to look up as marriage records, since changing your last name in the latter uses the same legal process as the former. Since it’s still just a name change.
The first approach should be to make sure the law is applied equally. If it exempts marriage, then there’s a good chance it is being applied “equally”, if there’s no other candidate it applies to
THEN you might argue the law is invalid because it’s discriminatory…. If there’s no other candidate it applies to, then you should have a good case to invalidate the law. You probably won’t help in time for an upcoming though