Opinion ID: 6324870
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Maras’s evidence

Text: {¶ 5} Maras signed a declaration of candidacy for the Republican Party nomination to run for secretary of state. On January 31, 2022, she (or her campaign, on her behalf) submitted her declarations and signed part-petitions to the secretary of state’s office. When she did, she separated the declaration pages from the signature pages, organizing the papers into 69 “batches” of documents. The first batch contained all the declarations of candidacy. The remaining 68 batches included only the signature pages, grouped by county. Maras argues in her merit brief that she “collated” the documents and separated them by county in order to “ease the process” for the secretary of state’s office and “increase their efficiency.” {¶ 6} On February 11, 2022, Amanda Grandjean,1 on behalf of the secretary of state’s office, sent an email to the county boards in response to requests “for guidance when a candidate omits a declaration of candidacy from a form used for gathering signatures.” Citing R.C. 3513.09 and State ex rel. Wilson v. Hisrich, 69 Ohio St.3d 13, 16, 630 N.E.2d 319 (1994), Grandjean instructed the county boards that part-petitions must include a copy of the candidate’s declaration. {¶ 7} On February 16, Secretary LaRose issued Directive 2022-24, announcing the state-wide candidates who had been certified to the May primaryelection ballot. Maras’s name was not on that list. On that same date, Grandjean wrote a letter to Maras to inform her that her candidacy was not certified “due to the petition’s invalidity.” According to Grandjean, Maras failed to copy her declaration onto the part-petitions, as required by R.C. 3513.09. She informed Maras that while Ohio requires 1,000 valid petition signatures for a person to qualify as a secretary-of-state candidate, the county boards had validated only 556 signatures for Maras’s candidacy. 1. Grandjean is the deputy assistant secretary of state and state elections director in the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office, Elections Division. 3 SUPREME COURT OF OHIO {¶ 8} Maras disputes the claim that she circulated part-petitions without the required declaration. She claims that she filed “an original Declaration of Candidacy with [her] wet ink signature, along with sufficient copies of the Declarations of Candidacy with each page two signature pages and circulators statements.” As evidence, she attached to her complaint affidavits from her petition circulators attesting that the petitions, when circulated, consisted of “a page one declaration of candidacy with each page two signature page and circulators statement.”