FBI raids Ohio voter registration nonprofit

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The raid by the FBI of an Ohio based non-partisan voting rights nonprofit, that included the seizure of cell phones and computers, is being blasted as heavy-handed voter intimidation ahead of the 2026 midterms.

According to multiple press reports, the FBI agents not only showed up at the Cleveland office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a community based voter registration nonprofit, but visited the homes of people tied to the civic engagement group.

Ohio’s swing state status ended after President Donald Trump racked up eight-point wins in 2016 and 2020 that grew to an 11-point margin in 2024. The GOP holds the governorship and lopsided majorities in both houses of the state legislature.

Prentiss Haney, a member of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s board of trustees told the Guardian the raid was “a full-on coordinated assault weaponizing the justice department and DHS against people who are fighting for working-class voters and Black voters to make sure they have access to the ballot.”

Back in April, Reuters reported that federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security were asking for individual voter registration information and “voting histories for dozens of voters-records that include driver’s license numbers and other confidential data” from six Ohio counties.

“If we are going to talk about partisanship and the FBI, we have to talk about fidelity and partisanship to the United States Constitution and to voting rights.”

This latest move follows on the heels of the FBI seizing ballots in Georgia from the 2020 election and the DOJ suing 30 states as well as Washington D.C. for election related data, like voter registration lists as well as ballots from past elections.

Last week the New York Times reported that the U.S. Postal Service had “proposed a new rule that would allow it to refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that don’t turn over voter rolls to the federal government. … It calls on states to compile lists of mail voters that Postal Service employees would screen ballots for eligibility.”

Under the U.S. Constitution, it is only state governments that determine the “times, places and manner” of conducting federal elections, not the president nor the federal government.

During a WBAI News Special, Jerry Austin, an Ohio based veteran Democratic campaign consultant who has managed statewide and national races, said the FBI raid in his state smacked of desperation by the Trump administration just ahead of the midterms.

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“Well, the bad news is what happened Thursday with the FBI but that’s also the good news because Ohio must be in play in 2026,” Austin said. “They wouldn’t be coming to a state that Trump won three times.”

Austin noted unless they were worried about “recent polling that had former Sen. Sherrod Brown up considerably over Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, and Amy Acton, our candidate for governor over Vivek Ramaswamy.”

“If we are going to talk about partisanship and the FBI, we have to talk about fidelity and partisanship to the United States Constitution and to voting rights,” said Dr. Joseph Wilson, labor historian and union consultant. “And historically the FBI has played a diabolical role in terms of civil rights, human rights and political rights starting with Jay Edgar Hoover and his attacks and subterfuge against Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.”

Wilson, who was the biographer for A. Philip Randolph, the iconic civil rights and labor leader, said the Ohio FBI raids “were an act of desperation that will backfire and only inspire greater voter turnout.”

Norman Siegel, one of the nation’s leading civil liberties attorneys, has led large-scale voting rights and voting registration efforts in the south and around the country. During the WBAI broadcast, Siegel emphasized it was critical that voting registration activists working for a nonprofit maintain a non-partisan stance, and not as operatives for a particular political party.

“You have to be very disciplined, otherwise they are going to claim that you are not being non-partisan,” Siegel said. “Over and over again this issue pops up.”

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and is civil rights attorney who has litigated cases for the Southern Poverty Law Center as well as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Browne-Marshall observed how the same FBI that covertly targeted Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists for subterfuge also prosecuted the KKK and investigated the death of civil rights workers.

“Think about this — that’s why we need to vote because administrations matter,” Browne-Marshall said on WBAI. “During one administration, the FBI can be weaponized against the American people — another administration the FBI can be a supporter of human rights and investigating people who are attacking folks for just wanting to vote — another administration is using the FBI to undermine our democracy by using them for voter suppression and undermining the right to vote. So votes matter.”

This article originally appeared on WBAI. Read the original here.

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