BUCYRUS — The Crawford County Prosecutor’s Office arraigned Bucyrus resident Zachary McIntyre on May 23 in connection with an alleged false voter registration case.

The 25-year-old was initially indicted for false voter registration, a fifth-degree felony, in July 2015. Local and state authorities believe such cases are part of a bigger problem.

According to Prosecutor Matthew Crall, authorities believe legal marijuana petitioners in Ohio encouraged signers to give fraudulent addresses last summer. The prosecutor was made aware of the issue last summer when petitions advocating the legalization of marijuana were passed around the state in an effort to get the initiative on the ballot.

Crall suspects that is what happened in the case of McIntyre, who faces up to one year in prison, a $2,500 fine and “convicted felon” status stamped on his record.

“There’s been a lot of trouble in Ohio, but we can’t prove they (petitioners) encouraged (signing fraudulent addresses on petitions),” Crall said.

The initiative, driven by political action committee ResponsibleOhio, was successful in gathering the necessary signatures by Aug. 12, 2015. But Secretary of State Jon Husted had his suspicions months earlier.

“ResponsibleOhio’s suspicious voter registration efforts seem to be simply another step in a growing trend of irresponsible behavior,” he said in a news release last June that alleged irregularities including:

• Registrants who reported non-existent addresses.

• Signatures that were illegible or did not match the signature on file for the applicant in the voter’s existing registration record.

• Multiple applications submitted on the same day for a single applicant at different addresses.

• Applicants who were underage and would not have turned 18 before the next general election and were thus ineligible to register at the time.

• Multiple registration forms that appeared to be completed in the same handwriting by a single person.

Joshua Eck, Husted’s press secretary, confirmed the Secretary of State’s office is investigating the way ResponsibleOhio collected signatures last summer.

“We know from our investigation that ResponsibleOhio and the Strategy Network’s petitions contained signatures of dead people,” Husted said in a news release last October. “We know from our investigation that they attempted to register people under fake addresses.

“We know from our investigation there were voter registration forms that were forged and completed by someone other than the registrant. We know from our investigation that practices used in putting this marijuana monopoly on the ballot were at best, questionable, and at worst, fraudulent.”

Eck said the investigation was stalled until just recently after a court case with ResponsibleOhio was settled in January. The settlement, according to Eck, was a formal compliance to a subpoena issued by the Secretary of State’s office.

ResponsibleOhio’s defense attorney, Larry Holliday James, was unaware of the reopened investigation, stating, “that investigation is dead.”

“There’s nothing left for us to do, I can tell you that,” he said in a phone interview last week. He added that ResponsibleOhio, as an organization, is currently not operational.

Crall said local authorities suspect McIntyre gave multiple applications at different addresses. Officials did not make an arrest until the week of May 16. McIntyre pleaded not guilty on Monday, May 23.

Crall said there were three instances of voter fraud in Crawford County within the last year. No charges were filed in the other two, however, after it was learned the discrepancies were innocent errors made by the voters.

Richland County did not prosecute anyone for alleged false voter registrations in the last year. Ashland County Board of Elections had one woman who made a mistake on her registration, but did not pass it to the county prosecutor’s office for litigation. 

Crall said his office likely would not have found the discrepancy in McIntyre’s voter registration without Husted’s advisory last summer.

“But our decision to prosecute or not was solely based on conversations between the Board of Elections and this office,” Crall said. “The Secretary of State was interested in knowing if we were prosecuting, but they weren’t the ones directing it.”

Crall said his office is not looking into any other voter fraud cases at this time.