CLEVELAND — A woman whose body was found in a storage unit in late May — and is estimated to have been dead since 2012 — potentially had absentee ballots cast under her name in the 2018 and 2020 primary and general elections, according to records obtained by News 5 from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.
Although elections officials cannot definitively conclude whether the woman’s son allegedly voted under her name; police investigators have determined that the man, 70-year-old Robert Ellzey, had been utilizing his mother’s Social Security and retirement benefits prior to his hoarding-related death in March.
As News 5 first reportedlast week, police detectives in both Parma Heights and Brook Park have been jointly investigating the deaths of Robert Ellzey and his mother, 97-year-old Lois Ellzey.
Robert Ellzey's body was discovered inside his home on Manorford Drive by Parma Heights officers following a welfare check in early March.
Over Memorial Day weekend, Brook Park officers recovered the remains of LoisEllzey, whose body was found inside of a box in the back of a storage unit that had been rented by Robert prior to his death, police said.
The medical examiner determined Robert Ellzey died of positional asphyxia, which meant that some of the items he had been hoarding had actually trapped him inside the home. His death was ruled an accident. Lois Ellzey's cause of death has not yet been determined.
Using both contextual and forensic clues, the medical examiner’s office estimated Lois died in 2012, although it remains unclear how long her body had been in the storage unit.
“Looking at bodies can give us some clues when somebody passed away,” said Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas Gilson. “You can get more specific if there is less than an interval between the time you’re making that assessment and when somebody died. That’s the challenge you know when you have somebody in a situation like [Lois]. When did we last see that person alive? When do we think they passed away based on the examination of their remains?”
While running a background check on Lois Ellzey in advance of last week’s story, News 5 noticed that a public records database featured entries that suggested that she had voting-related activity during the period in which she was reportedly dead.
News 5 then reached out to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections who poured through its archives. Through a public records request, elections officials provided three absentee ballot applications and one ID envelope containing what is purported to be Lois Ellzey's signature. Elections officials also provided to News 5 another document containing her signature from 1972 that the board of elections had on file.
The signatures on all of the documents provided to News 5 appear to be similar in style and construction. Additionally, elections officials said some variations in a person’s signature are to be expected, especially given the fact that Lois Ellzey would have been in her late 80s or early 90s.
Lois Ellzey spent more than four decades living at her Manford Dr. home. Investigators believe she lived alone with her son, Robert Ellzey, a majority of that time.
“[Robert] had access to information that people normally wouldn’t have: her date of birth and her ID all matched correctly. The signature was very close as well,” Anthony Kaloger, the deputy director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, said at a board meeting Wednesday. “Our staff did what they were supposed to do. They verified the date of birth, the ID information and the signature matched. We processed them as we would.”
Elections officials appeared to unanimously agree that the agency’s internal voter fraud prevention measures had worked as intended and that there would have been no way for staff to know whether Robert Ellzey had been casting votes in his mother’s name. It does not appear that anyone definitively knew that Lois had been dead for an estimated 10 years.
Gilson said Friday that the estimated time of death is just that — an estimate. Decomposition and, later, mummification can be influenced heavily by weather, humidity and other factors. The interval of time between death and the discovery of the remains also weighs heavily on how wide of an estimate that forensic pathologists determine.
“A lot of the things that you rely on for [determining estimated time of death] start to really have big standards of deviation,” Dr. Gilson said. “Weather would be very much a factor. If you ever walked into a storage unit that isn’t [refrigerated], the sun is beating down on it and it can become incredibly hot and you would almost expect (decomposition) to go a lot faster.”
Elections officials tell News 5 that the CCBOE purged Robert Ellzey’s name from the voter rolls in early June once the state department of health provided confirmation of his death. Once confirmation is provided as to Lois Ellzey’s death, she too will be removed from the voter rolls, officials said.
