More than a year before the FBI search on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative last week, federal agents asked Cuyahoga County elections officials about voter registrations submitted by canvassers working for a firm owned by one of the progressive group’s founders, a county election official said.
In an interview Tuesday, Tony Kaloger, the deputy director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, said the FBI in February or March 2025 followed up on two complaints Cuyahoga County elections officials filed with the state against Black Fork Strategies.
Elections officials had previously flagged multiple voter registrations filed by Black Fork canvassers as questionable, including four instances in which elections officials said the firm’s workers submitted registrations in the name of dead voters.
Black Fork is owned by Kirk Noden, a founder of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, the group the FBI searched, according to tax returns filed by the group and its affiliates. The Ohio Organizing Campaign, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s political arm, paid $10.6 million to Black Fork in 2023 and 2024 for consulting services, an amount equal to about 93% of the group’s total spending in those years, tax filings show.
Kaloger said elections officials had previously spoken with state Bureau of Criminal Investigation agents – sort of the equivalent of the Ohio FBI, housed under Attorney General Dave Yost’s office. Kaloger said he got the impression state agents were spread thin, and that federal agents had picked up the case. The FBI’s questions had to do with elections processes and elections’ officials interactions with Black Fork officials, and he said agents also requested some voter registration cards.
Kaloger said he didn’t hear anything else about the issue until news reports broke last week that the FBI had raided the Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s northeast Ohio office.
“We hadn’t heard anything up until last week. And even then we weren’t notified. I didn’t even know, to be honest with you, up until I saw news reports regarding the connection between OOC and Black Fork,” Kaloger said.
Importantly, Kaloger, a Republican, said Black Fork’s work didn’t seem to result in illegal voting.
“It’s one thing if the circulator was just trying to meet some quota, so he’s creating false cards just to meet his quota,” Kaloger said. “It’s another thing if they’re going to create false identities and try to vote those people. And we don’t have evidence of that.”
Federal agents’ questions going back more than a year paint a picture of an investigation that may have been building for some time. But key details about the focus, scope and what led to last week’s searches remain unclear.
Still, the apparent federal investigation alarmed Democrats who saw it as politically motivated during a key election year.
An Ohio Organizing Collaborative official described a sweeping federal operation that unfolded on Thursday and Friday, with dozens of FBI agents visiting the organization’s offices and visiting the homes of former and current workers.
Prior to that operation, federal agents also questioned elections officials about Black Fork and OOC-submitted voter registrations in Franklin County earlier this year, according to news reports.
The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is a longtime player in state liberal politics. The group is officially nonpartisan, but works closely with Democrats, helping to register voters – focusing on Black and student voters, among other groups – in communities that often vote for Democrats. It also works on local and state ballot issues, and sued state officials in 2021, challenging new Republican-drawn state legislative maps.
The Ohio Organizing Collaborative has seen its funding swell this decade, receiving tens of millions of dollars from large, left-of-center foundations that fund political action across the country. The group also plays a role directing national funding to state progressive groups, with tax records showing the group awarding grants to groups involved in policy research, social media content creation, public relations and other forms of political advocacy.
Prentiss Haney, a board member for the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, said in an interview on Monday that federal investigators seem to be looking into allegations of voter fraud in 2024. He said officials in Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s Public Integrity Division previously investigated the same issues, but no charges came of it.
Haney said dozens of federal agents were involved with the investigation, raiding an Ohio Organizing Collaborative office on Thursday and seizing electronic equipment. The feds also interviewed the group’s current and former canvassers, staff, board members and volunteers on Thursday and Friday, tracking them down at their homes, workplaces and other locations, he said.
Haney called the investigation textbook political intimidation similar to Civil Rights Era repressions in the 1960s.
“It’s been investigated, the organizations have complied and there’s been no findings,” Haney said. “It’s odd they then would come fishing for the same thing.”
Signal Statewide used a contact form on Black Fork Strategies’ website to attempt to contact officials at the company. We also reached out to an Ohio Organizing Collaborative spokesperson seeking to get in touch with the company, and haven’t heard back.
The FBI hasn’t commented on the investigation. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security on Monday confirmed that DHS is “providing support for an active FBI investigation in Ohio,” but declined to comment further.
Black Fork voter registrations draw federal scrutiny in Columbus
Black Fork Strategies’ voter registration activities have drawn scrutiny from election officials in Cuyahoga, Hamilton, Delaware and Franklin counties, which all reported in 2024 that canvassers working for the company submitted suspicious registrations. Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, announced in August 2024 that he’d referred some of these same cases to “numerous” county prosecutors.
It’s not clear how many of the referrals, if any, have led to charges. LaRose wrote a letter to Republican state legislators in October 2024, describing challenges in convincing county prosecutors to take on the cases. In the letter, obtained by Signal Statewide, LaRose also said Yost told him the state AG’s office lacks legal authority to investigate voter registration fraud.
By early 2025, following Donald Trump’s election in the November 2024 presidential election, federal agents were asking Cuyahoga County elections officials about the cases.
The Department of Homeland Security then asked about Black Fork and the Ohio Organizing Collaborative in a 2026 email correspondence with elections officials in Franklin County, WSYX and cleveland.com reported. The email described an ongoing investigation into “a pattern of fraudulent voter registration activity in multiple counties under the employment of a group called Black Fork Strategies,” according to WSYX.
Franklin County elections officials declined to comment for this story, but in an April interview with Signal Statewide, described DHS requesting voter registration records and posing questions about some.
Elections officials flagged problems with Black Fork in 2022
Elections officials first raised concerns about Black Fork Strategies around the time of the November 2022 election, when Ohio voted on governor and U.S. Senate races, among others. The following year, Cuyahoga County elections officials flagged at least 18 instances of irregularities, which they said represented the most egregious examples. The group submitted roughly 11,000 registrations between late 2022 and early 2023, elections officials said.
Three Cuyahoga County voters discovered their registrations had been changed only after requesting vote-by-mail applications and found they had been sent to different addresses. Nine voters had to vote provisionally – a form of voting in which ballots aren’t immediately counted as elections workers perform extra verification – after showing up at their polling place on Election Day and learning someone had changed their registration address.
In three cases, registrations were submitted for dead voters. One involved someone who had died in 2020 – although the registration form included that person’s date of birth and the last four digits of their Social Security number.
“The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections has experience investigating questionable registration cards provided by individual voters. However in this case the questionable actions involve an entire voter registration organization and their employees,” reads a summary included in materials shared with Board of Elections members for its July 14, 2023 meeting.
Kaloger, the Cuyahoga County deputy elections director, told Signal Statewide on Tuesday that Black Fork officials described the irregularities as conduct by a few “bad apples.”
After pressure from elections officials, the company agreed to begin marking registration forms to help identify which canvassers had circulated them.
Cuyahoga County officials reported more problems with Black Fork registrations submitted ahead of the 2024 election.
A summary provided to Board of Elections members for their Aug. 19, 2024 meeting jointly describes irregularities with registrations issued by Black Fork and another firm, Second Street Associates, a political canvassing firm without a clear tie to Black Fork. It said Cuyahoga County wasn’t alone in having these types of issues. The records said the two companies provided numerous duplicate registrations, with elections workers receiving 17,000 registration cards for 6,500 voters, including three duplicate registrations for 1,315 voters.
Black Fork canvassers also submitted two registrations for people who had died – one in 2012 and the other in 2020, according to board records.
“From those conversations, we have seen some improvements, but other issues continue to present day. The issues that CCBOE (Cuyahoga County Board of Elections) Staff have seen are not unique to Cuyahoga County. As reported by other Board of Elections across the state of Ohio, CCBOE Staff are finding similar fact patterns,” the summary says.
Kaloger said when asked about the irregularities, Black Fork told county elections officials the canvassers weren’t paid per registration – rather, they were paid a per diem amount.
“They attributed it to someone who was probably lazy and came up with ways to not go around and register people,” Kaloger said. County elections officials saw no evidence any of the registrations they flagged resulted in someone voting fraudulently, he said.
In both 2023 and 2024, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections two Republican and two Democratic members voted unanimously to refer the cases to the state for further investigation.
Elections officials had similar complaints about Black Fork canvassers in Hamilton County. In one case, two voters discovered someone had changed their registration address to their place of business when they received cards from the county informing them of the change.
Sherry Poland, the Hamilton County Board of Elections director, said during a July 2024 meeting that her office found a batch of registrations that all seemed to be signed by the same person, and one submitted under the name “Henry Kissinger” – which matched the name of the famous American diplomat but no one in state voter or BMV records. Like in Cuyahoga County, Hamilton County’s election board members unanimously voted to refer the registrations for investigation by the state.
In Franklin County, elections officials struck at least four voter registrations submitted by Black Fork canvassers. Two involved a woman in Dublin discovering two men she’d never heard of were registered to vote at her home, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
LaRose posts picture of FBI director
A spokesperson for LaRose declined to comment on Monday, pointing instead to an August 2024 press release in which LaRose announced he’d referred some of the cases to county prosecutors. But LaRose mocked state Democrats on Friday for calling the investigation politically motivated.
“Do they always react this way when there’s ‘nothing to find?’” LaRose, who is running for state auditor in the November election against Democrat Annette Blackwell, wrote in a post on X. “Asking for a friend.”
On Saturday, LaRose posted a picture of himself shaking FBI Director Kash Patel’s hand. He didn’t include an additional comment.
Details of the actual investigation remain unclear. Asked about the case on Tuesday, Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said he only knew what he’d read in the news, and said he didn’t know enough about the investigation to comment on it.
Liberal groups rally around Ohio Organizing Collaborative
Meanwhile, Democrats and liberal groups are organizing to push back, accusing the Trump administration of trying to stifle organizing efforts ahead of a midterm election where Democrats are expected to make national gains.
A group calling itself the Democracy Defense Campaign announced its existence on Monday. A press release included statements of support for the Ohio Organizing Collaborative from leaders with groups including Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio, Abortion Forward, the Ohio Federation of Teachers, the ACLU of Ohio and All Voting is Local, a voting-rights group.
The group, operating under a website called Hands Off Ohio, also announced it is holding a rally in Cleveland on Thursday, where organization officials say they plan to teach attendees how to properly register people to vote.
“Ohioans deserve to understand exactly what is happening: the Trump administration and their allies are desperate to hold onto power because Ohioans are rejecting their cruel agenda,” Michael McGovern, a Democratic operative who leads Innovation Ohio, a liberal advocacy group that received pass-through funding from the Ohio Organizing Collaborative in 2024, said in a statement.
Democratic politicians also have rallied around the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, saying Thursday’s investigation appeared to be meant to intimidate Democratic voters and groups ahead of the November elections, when Ohioans will vote for governor, U.S. Senate and other offices. U.S. Rep. Shontel Brown, of Cleveland, has announced a press conference in Cleveland on Wednesday after previously calling on the FBI to quickly release more details about the investigation.
A spokesperson for the Ohio Organizing Collaborative didn’t return messages on Friday and Tuesday. But the group referenced the investigation in a Friday Facebook post.
“For two decades, Ohio Organizing Collaborative has worked to ensure that every Ohioan has a voice in our democracy. We are proud of our work, stand by our program and staff, and will not be deterred from carrying out our vital mission,” the post said.
