Can a county Board of Elections choose a substitute candidate in a closed meeting? This was the central question in The State ex rel. Koebel v. Erie County Board of Elections et al debated in the Ohio Supreme Court. It was filed by a voter who demanded the removal of a Republican replacement candidate from the shortly forthcoming November 2026 general election ballot. While the court agreed this voter’s claims had legal standing, they objected that his 25-day delay in filing this lawsuit meant that they were now beyond the point when ballots could be changed without extremely wasteful costs. Overseas and military ballots had already been mailed starting on September 18. And rewriting and reprinting 36,450 physical ballots was deemed to be too costly.
Events began on August 4, when D.J. Swearingen won the Republican primary but then withdrew from the general election. On August 10, a Republican Party district committee met behind closed doors and chose Caleb Stidham as their replacement nominee. The filer of this lawsuit is a regular voter, Carl Koebel, who tried to gain entry to this meeting, but was denied entry. Koebel has argued that the closure of this meeting to the public meant this committee took upon themselves to perform an illegal (by Ohio’s Open Meetings Act) sovereign governmental function. Then, on August 20, the Erie County Board of Elections reached a 2-2 tie to certify Stidham that had to be broken by Secretary of State Frank LaRose in favor of Stidham’s certification. Koebel’s petition for removal was filed on September 14.
The outcome of Koebel’s filing was that the court reaffirmed the Ohio precedent that any voter has a beneficial interest to sue an election board to force their performance of statutory duties. However, Koebel’s delay invalidated the filing, meaning the court did not have to decide on if the nomination violated the Open Meetings rule. A minority of judges—Justice Brunner and Chief Justice Kennedy—had wanted to vote on the merits despite the tardiness.
According to Ohio’s procedural rules, when a nominee withdraws, the replacement is made by a district committee made up of county party leaders. Political parties are private organizations that can hold closed meetings to choose a replacement candidate. An exception has developed in Ohio after Jones v. Geauga County Republican Party Central Committee (2017) that decided that whenever a private party meets to fill a public government vacancy it is performing a “sovereign governmental function”, and this falls under the Open Meetings Act. The 2017 case had addressed the appointment of vacancies such as county commissioner or sheriff, whereas this latest case is about appointing a county party nominee. Thus, this could have been an interesting case for the court to address if it would not have been wasteful to engage in debate at the cost of complicating and spiking the cost of an ongoing election.
Though the more interesting question nobody has asked is: why are parties private? Why are a few unelected people gathering in closed rooms to decide who the public is allowed to vote on? Though America is more democratic than other countries in some regards. Elsewhere, political parties are also private, and they privately select their candidates, whereas in the U.S. the public votes in primary elections to instruct these private institutions who they should forward as their candidate. Though even if slightly more democratic, the private party system invites antidemocratic corruptions. The voters should see some list of positions of all candidates on issues they care about and click to pick how they side on the issues to choose a candidate. Or better yet, true democracy would mean voters logging into a national voting system and voting separately on each item a representative would otherwise vote over on their behalf. Directly choosing to go to war or not, or what government funds should be spent on would override many of the problems we face when representatives’ votes can be bought by interested corporations, foreign entities, or other actors.
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