Ohio GOP challenges 35,000 on voter rolls
Cuyahoga board struggles to solve workload problem
Saturday, October 23, 2004
Scott Hiaasen
Cleveland Plain Dealer

A bare-knuckled political season got even rougher Friday when the Ohio Republican Party formally challenged the validity of 35,000 voter registrations across the state.

Republicans said their goal was to expel fraudulent voters and protect the integrity of the Nov. 2 election. But Democrats accused their rivals of mounting a systematic campaign to block people especially potential Democratic voters from casting ballots.
About 14,000 of the challenged registrations are in Cuyahoga County. Local elections boards have until Oct. 31 to review every registration, hold hearings where the parties can present evidence and notify every voter who could be tossed from the rolls.

That could be a nightmare in Cuyahoga, where elections officials met into the night Friday to figure out how to handle all the work.

Voter-registration groups, many with Democratic ties, have helped to enlist more than 600,000 new voters in Ohio. Elections officials have found some bogus registration forms with forged signatures and fake names.

"We've just read and heard too much about potential fraud and disruption," said Jim Trakas, chairman of Cuyahoga County's Republican Party.

"We just want to make sure votes are not diluted," Trakas said.

Jimmy Dimora, head of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, countered: "Their whole goal is to try to lessen the voter rank and file."

The 35,000 registrations, spread among 65 counties, are for voters who are not receiving mail at the addresses on their voting records.

Local boards mailed the voters confirmation cards after they registered, but the cards came back as undeliverable. The boards cannot remove these voters from the rolls without proof that they no longer live in their respective counties, according to elections officials.

Though Trakas calls these voters "highly suspicious," Democrats and some elections officials say the voters may be legitimate.

"It could be a clerical error. It could be numerous reasons," said Tom McCabe, the deputy elections director in Mahoning County, where Republicans challenged about 100 voters.

Dimora said the Democrats will be prepared to fight to keep the voters on the books.

"If they [Republicans] try to knock out registrations we think are valid, we will challenge," he said.

The Republicans have also challenged about 3,000 voters in Montgomery County, 969 in Summit, 900 in Lucas and 150 in Lorain.

Also Friday, both parties filed lists of challengers across the state who will patrol the polls on Election Day. These party representatives may challenge individual voters, though officials from both parties have said their primary goal is to keep tabs on one another.

The representatives can challenge a voter if they suspect the voter is not a resident of that precinct, is not a citizen or is not at least 18 years old. The voter would be questioned by poll workers and asked to fill out a form swearing he or she is eligible.

In Cuyahoga and other counties, the parties may have representatives in every precinct. In other counties, the parties filed papers to appear in only ed areas.

In addition, local Democrats, including county Treasurer Jim Rokakis and U.S. Senate candidate Eric Fingerhut, filed their own list of Cuyahoga County challengers at the request of John Kerry's presidential campaign. That allows the party to have even more challengers on hand for Election Day.

In Montgomery County, the local party leaders had agreed earlier this week to trust one another and avoid putting challengers in polling places. But that unraveled on Friday when the county Republican chairman, John White, was overruled by Robert Bennett, the state GOP chairman.

The Republicans filed a challenger list in 191 precincts - many of them in largely black neighborhoods around Dayton. But Bennett angrily denied that his party was targeting a specific voting bloc.

"I'm not going to play this game of suppression and intimidation," Bennett said. "Voter fraud is voter fraud, no matter where it occurs."

In every county, the big issue for the challengers may be to keep an eye on how provisional ballots are used.

These ballots are intended to be a fail-safe for voters who believe they are registered but don't appear on the poll books. They are often given to voters who show up at the wrong polling place. Elections officials expect more provisional ballots this year because of the intense voter-registration drives.

How these ballots will be issued and counted remains undecided. A legal fight between Ohio Democrats and Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican, is now before a federal appeals court.

Plain Dealer reporters Sandy Theis, Terry Oblander, Catherine Gabe, Dave Davis and Angela Chatman contributed to this story.