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ELECTION DAY AFTERMATH
More voting questions raised
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Jon Craig
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Several new voting concerns surfaced yesterday as lawyers combed totals from the Nov. 2 presidential election.

An Akron man filed a complaint with the Summit County Board of Elections saying he "witnessed election judges telling potential voters that they could cast a provisional ballot at any table or precinct and if they did so, it would be counted."

Neil F. Schoenwetter Jr. was a volunteer election challenger for the Democratic Party on Nov. 2 at Copley High School, where six precincts voted.

Congress’ investigative agency, responding to complaints from Ohio and elsewhere, has begun to look into the vote count, including the handling of provisional ballots and malfunctions of voting machines.

The Government Accountability Office usually begins investigations at the request of Congress, but the agency’s head, Comptroller General David Walker, said the GAO acted on its own because of ballot-counting complaints.

The investigation was not triggered by several House Democrats who had written the agency this month, seeking an investigation. That effort was led by senior Judiciary Committee member John Conyers, of Michigan.

Conyers yesterday said he would like the investigation to include allegations that not enough voting machines were available in some Democratic areas, such as Franklin County.

Meanwhile, attorneys for various citizen action groups that plan to contest the results said they are puzzled that vote totals in the presidential race in Warren County far exceed totals in most other statewide and countywide races.

For example, the total of 94,415 votes cast there for President Bush or Sen. John Kerry is 3,000 more than all those cast in the U.S. Senate race and a constitutional amendment about same-sex marriage.

Further, 20,000 to 24,000 fewer votes were cast in three Ohio Supreme Court races and 13,000 to 24,000 fewer were cast in various countywide races.

In Warren County, which reported a 33 percent increase in voter turnout from the 2000 elections, election officials had banned observers at the polls for "homeland security" concerns.

Clifford O. Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the Alliance for Democracy, said he has testimony from poll worker Liz Kent, of Warren County, asserting, "There was no way the actual vote could have been as reported."

Arnebeck’s group plans to join several others in contesting the results in the Ohio Supreme Court. Two third-party presidential candidates plan to formally request a recount.

President Bush’s uncertified margin of victory over Kerry totals more than 137,000 votes in Ohio. There were 155,337 provisional and more than 5,000 overseas ballots.

In Summit County, Schoenwetter said he witnessed election judges giving incorrect instructions to voters in four precincts.

"I tried, unsuccessfully, to point out the judges’ errors to the judges," he said in his affidavit. "I also observed that poll workers were not helpful to — in fact, some were overtly hostile to the idea of helping — voters whose names were not on the rolls in finding their correct polling place.

"Some lines were over an hour or two long. At other precincts, there was no line. I believe that there were potential voters who requested provisional ballots at the incorrect precinct because it was more convenient and because they were told that casting a provisional ballot at any precinct was acceptable," he said.

Bryan C. Williams, director of the Summit County elections board, said he was unaware of Schoenwetter’s affidavit, saying, "We have a stack of complaints we received."

Williams said it would be incorrect to advise people that their provisional ballot would be counted if they were in the wrong precinct. Of 5,400 provisional ballots, about 25 percent won’t be counted, he said, including people not registered or at the wrong address.

Separately, Williams said he plans to refer to the county sheriff, for possible prosecution, the names of 20 people confirmed to have voted twice.

The Cuyahoga County elections board voted Monday to reject one out of three of the 24,472 provisional ballots cast in the Nov. 2 election. The bulk of the 8,099 invalidated ballots were determined to be cast by nonregistered voters or registered voters who cast ballots in the wrong precincts.

In Sandusky County, double counting of 2,600 ballots from nine precincts resulted from duplicate storage in a computer disk, the elections board said. No outcomes were affected by the error, the elections board in northwestern Ohio said.

Barb Tuckerman, board of elections director in Sandusky County, said the error, initially blamed on ballots being run through a scanner twice, was traced to workers duplicating backups of vote totals for the nine precincts on a computerstorage disk.

"We checked everything as it came out of the machines. We got the right answer," Tuckerman said.

In Gahanna, 3,893 extra votes were recorded for Bush because of an unexplained touch-screen machine malfunction. And in Youngstown, some voters who tried to cast ballots for Kerry on electronic machines saw their votes recorded for Bush instead.

Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert T. Bennett issued a statement questioning the vote challenges:

"These groups have already acknowledged the outcome of the election will not change, and their actions represent a foolish attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Bush presidency," he said. "I call on the leadership of the Ohio Democratic Party to immediately concede that this worthless recount request is an insult to the integrity of Ohio’s election system."

Information from the Associated Press was included in this story.


jcraig@dispatch.com