Observers scrutinize recount of Ohio votes; Lucas County done with 1st part of job

FROM Toledo BLADE STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS   16 December 2004

CINCINNATI - In a scene reminiscent of Florida circa 2000, two teams of Republican and Democratic election workers held punch-card ballots up to the light yesterday and whispered back and forth as they tried to divine the voters' intent from a few hanging chads.

Observers for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry, President Bush, and Green Party candidate David Cobb kept watch from chairs a few feet away.

The scene is being repeated statewide this week in a recount in the state that put Mr. Bush over the top in the election last month.

Officially, Mr. Bush beat Mr. Kerry by 119,000 votes in Ohio, but Mr. Cobb and Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik collected the required $113,600 for a recount they claim will show serious irregularities.

The Kerry campaign is supporting the recount, though it has acknowledged it will not change the outcome.

The recounts began this week. At least 35 of Ohio's 88 counties had completed their recounts or were starting yesterday, according to a survey by The Associated Press.

Some of the tallies will not be complete until next week.

"It takes a lot of work, a lot of hours," said Kerry campaign observer Jeannette Harrison, a real estate agent.

"This is a job that has to be done."

In Lucas County, the board of elections completed the first phase of its recount of votes cast in last month's presidential election, the county elections director said yesterday.

Three teams of Republicans and Democrats finished a count of 20 randomly ed precincts, which amounted to 3 percent of the countywide vote.

"Our hand count matched our machine count, as required by the secretary of state's directives and the code," said elections director Paula Hicks-Hudson. The matching vote totals pave the way for the rest of the county's 221,000 votes cast in the election to be recounted using optical-scan machinery.

Witnesses from the Republican, Democratic, and Green parties watched the proceedings in a corner of the elections office in Government Center that was cleared for the exercise.

In Cincinnati, the Hamilton County workers grimaced in concentration as they examined the ballot holes up close - a scene that called to mind the five weeks of recounts in Florida that made the terms "pregnant chad" and "butterfly ballot" famous.

Hamilton County workers wrote their results on tally sheets as they counted ballots from 30 precincts randomly ed from the county's 1,013 - a total of about 13,000 of 433,000 ballots cast there in November.

Statewide, about 92,000 ballots cast in last month's presidential election failed to record a vote for president, most of them on punch-card systems.

Under Ohio law, workers must hand-count 3 percent of ballots. If the results match the certified results exactly, all other ballots can be recounted by machine. If the totals are off, all ballots must be counted by hand, adding days or weeks to the process.

Ms. Harrison, an Ohio Democratic Party executive committee member, said she is sharing details of what she sees with state party officials in hopes of improving future elections in Ohio.

Separately, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and attorney Cliff Arnebeck of the Alliance for Democracy are backing a request on behalf of 40 Ohio voters asking the state Supreme Court to econsider the election results, accusing Mr. Bush's campaign of "high-tech vote stealing."

Mr. Jackson said activists challenging the election outcome noticed that Mr. Bush generally received more votes in counties that use optical-scan voting machines and questioned whether the machines were calibrated to record votes for Mr. Bush.

The challengers also claim there were disparities in vote totals for Democrats, too few voting machines in Democrat-leaning precincts, organized campaigns directing voters to the wrong polling places, and confusion over the counting of provisional ballots by voters whose names did not appear in the records at polling places.

If the court decides to hear the challenge, it can declare a new winner or throw out the results. However, Ohio's electors cast the state's 20 electoral votes for Mr. Bush on Monday.

Green party observer Denise McCoskey, 36, a Miami University instructor, said she is concerned some provisional ballots were rejected in cases where voters went to a polling place for multiple precincts and cast ballots at the wrong precinct within that polling location.