Blackwell to testify before committee

Associated Press    21 March 2005

COLUMBUS, Ohio - The state's chief elections official has a message for those who say Ohio's Nov. 2 election was fraught with unpreparedness, mistakes and fraud: Take a closer look.

Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell was scheduled to testify at a field hearing of the U.S. House Administration Committee on Monday, more than a month after failing to appear at the panel's first post-election hearing in Washington.

U.S. Rep. Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican and the committee's chairman, took Blackwell's absence as a snub, especially since Blackwell was in Washington the same day to lead a meeting of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute.

Blackwell said he couldn't appear at fellow Republican Ney's hearing because of the previously scheduled institute meeting. Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, another Republican, also did not appear, citing a previous commitment in her state.

Blackwell was expected to tell Ney's committee on Monday that most of his critics' complaints about counting provisional ballots, long lines at polling places and ballots thrown out because of voting irregularities were groundless.

"Overall, Ohio has a good system and it performed well under extraordinary stress. And yes, it has some weaknesses," Blackwell said in testimony prepared for the committee.

Ohio and its 20 electoral votes were key to President Bush's victory over John Kerry. Bush carried the state by 118,000 votes, or 2 percentage points.

A report prepared by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee accused Ohio election officials of disenfranchising minority and Democratic voters by misallocating voting machines in their districts and restricting the use of provisional ballots. Blackwell's order that registrations must be on a certain weight of paper also drew fire in the staff report.

Blackwell has denied the staff's allegations.

"It was a stunning and disgraceful display demonstrating that there are those in Congress who are very willing to cast aside the Constitution and the lawfully certified vote of the people to wage a nasty and disingenuous partisan attack," Blackwell said in his testimony.