The Pryce of democracy in Ohio's 15th Congressional District December 3, 2006
The Republican Party is on the brink of seizing another seat in the U.S. Congress. The key race iis the central Ohio 15th District Congressional House seat held by Deborah Pryce, the fourth most powerful Republican in Congress.
On election night the preliminary vote count showed Pryce beating Franklin County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy by 3717 votes out of more than 200,000 cast. Nearly 20,000 votes remained uncounted after Election Day. Kilroy refused to concede and demanded a full accounting of provisional, absentee and uncounted machine votes.
On Monday, November 27, the final tally was announced. Kilroy officially picked up 2482 votes, leaving Pryce ahead by 1054. The Franklin County Board of Elections could have certified the results earlier, but chose instead to wait until after the Big Ten championship football game between Ohio State and the University of Michigan.
Because the margin is within 1/2% of the votes cast, Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matt Damschroder says this will trigger an automatic recount within ten days.
By all rights, Kilroy would seem to be an obvious winner, except for a number of suspect statistics. For example, an analysis by the Columbus Dispatch shows that wards with more than 90% African-American voters in Franklin County had just a 24% turnout in the Columbus area. But in Cleveland and Cincinnati, similar wards had a 34% and 33% turnout respectively.
The low voter turnout in Franklin County may be the lingering effect of the 4-7 hour waits that the black community suffered in the 2004 presidential election due to the lack of voting machines. The average voter turnout in the Columbus area overall was slightly over 50%.
BUT THERE MAY ALSO BE THEFT INVOLVED.
The Franklin County Board of Elections rejected 2600 provisional ballots, many of them from registered voters who voted in the wrong precinct. A 2004 directive from Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell for the first time disallowed the votes of registered voters in the county if they voted out of their precinct. Historically, all voters registered in the county had their votes counted from the county races up to the statewide and federal races.
In another new development introduced in the 2006 election as a result of House Bill 3, voters were flagged with a stop sign symbol by their name in the pollbook. Free Press reporters saw some flagged voters turned away from the polls in violation of laws and others being allowed to vote in the wrong precinct, which would nullify their vote.
Both Pryce and Kilroy anticipate a recount, but voting rights activists question whether an actual "random" recount will occur. While Ohio law requires a random recount, with every ballot having an equal chance of inclusion, Blackwell has, in the past, allowed local Boards of Elections to determine their own methods for selection of ballots to be recounted. A sample by the Free Press and reports from recount observers in the 2004 presidential election, found non-random methods of selection predominated.
If the 3% recount of the paper ballots matches the official certified tally, the results will stand. If they don't, then all of the ballots will have to be recounted by hand. This would mean counting the paper trail from the ES&S electronic voting machines in Franklin County.
When Election Science Institute recounted the ballots in Cuyahoga County following the 2006 spring primary meltdown, they found a 5% discrepancy between the electronic votes recorded on the Diebold personal electronic ballots (PEBs) and hard drives and the actual paper trails.
An audit sponsored by the Free Press in Miami County of Opti-scan machines found a similar discrepancy of 5% between the paper ballots and the results as scanned and centrally tabulated by a computer. The Free Press found that the Miami County results were not discovered during the 2004 presidential election recount because of flawed recounting methodology. Miami County officials unsealed the Opti-scan ballots, ran them through the counting machine, got a total, and then recounted by hand. The problem was that the results were not compared back to the officially certified results, but only to the machine counted results.
Numerous irregularities occurred, not just in the Kilroy-Pryce district that includes the western portion of Franklin County and parts of Union and Madison counties, but throughout Franklin County, which is the heart of Kilroy's support in the district.
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