Volunteers complete local recount

By Jim Konkoly  Coshocton Tribune   18 December 2004
COSHOCTON Coshocton County's voting system of paper ballots counted by optical scanning machines works remarkably well.

Mary Fry, elections director, made that assessment based on this week's recount of the 17,329 ballots cast countywide in the presidential election.

Twenty volunteers, working in 10 teams of one Democrat and one Republican, hand counted every ballot.

The recount added 35 votes for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, giving him a total of 7,413, and deducted nine votes from President George W. Bush, setting his official total at 9,830.

In each of the 35 ballots for Kerry not counted on election night, the voter mistakenly voted twice for the Democratic candidate, Fry said.

On those ballots, the voters marked the circle beside Kerry's name and then also wrote his name in as a write-in candidate, Fry said.

"Our machine bypassed those because the person had voted twice in one race, and our machines will not pick that up," Fry said.

The recount of the presidential vote in all of Ohio's 88 counties was requested by the National Voting Reform Institute in Boston, representing presidential candidates David Cobb of the Green Party, a write-in candidate, and Michael Bednarik, a non-partisan candidate listed on the ballot.

Coshocton County's recount did not change the vote totals for the four third-party presidential candidates, which stayed at 68 votes for Michael Anthony Peroutka, 15 for Bednarik, two for Joseph Schriner and one for Cobb.

Ken Grewe, chairman of the Coshocton County Board of Elections, said the recount could not have been completed by the Dec. 20 deadline without the work of the 20 volunteers who counted each ballot.

The board of elections had no funds left to pay for a recount and the $10 fee per precinct for the recount would not have come close to covering the cost if workers had to be paid, he said.

"We have concerned citizens here, and everyone that I asked (to volunteer) accepted right away," Grewe said. "We owe them a big thank you."

Fourteen witnesses, from as far away as South Carolina and California, representing the Democratic, Green and Libertarian parties, watched the recount, Fry said.

"If anyone had questions about the counting of votes in Coshocton County, I think this recount verifies that our machines work very well," Fry said.