Ohio to begin final tally

By Ralph Vartabedian and Henry Weinstein
Los Angeles Times

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Ohio election officials said yesterday that they would begin later this week the final count of 155,428 provisional ballots and an unknown number of overseas absentee ballots that were cast in the presidential election.

According to the preliminary tally, which included all domestic absentee ballots, Sen. John Kerry lost Ohio by 136,483 votes, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell said.

Attorneys for the Kerry campaign said yesterday they did not believe the outcome of the Ohio vote, which gave President Bush the electoral votes needed to win, could possibly change; they have discouraged speculation that voting irregularities caused Kerry's loss.

Nonetheless, the Ohio count is attracting scrutiny by groups who say the election was tainted and voting equipment in Ohio, Florida, South Carolina and elsewhere was defective. Six congressional Democrats have asked for a federal investigation.

Since the election, Internet sites and political blogs have buzzed with speculation that the vote was manipulated. "Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked," reads the title of one widely circulated Web offering.

Voting-machine failures did occur, and long lines in heavily Democratic precincts discouraged some potential voters. Still, a broad range of experts said the final vote counts in Ohio and other states could not possibly change the outcome.

Cleveland attorney Mark Griffin, who played a key role in the Kerry campaign's voter-protection efforts in that area, said he did not expect the tallying of provisional or absentee ballots to change anything.

After meeting yesterday with Michael Vu, head of the board of elections in Ohio's Cuyahoga County, Griffin said: "This is really not about changing the outcome. ... It is about making sure every vote counts, particularly people who waited in line three hours."

The 2004 Ohio vote was not nearly as close as the disputed Florida results in 2000.
 
If all of the provisional votes are deemed valid, then Kerry would need 88 percent of them to overcome Bush's margin of victory, assuming the remaining overseas absentee ballots were split evenly.

But many of the provisional ballots will be tossed out. In past elections, about 10 percent were judged as not coming from legitimately registered voters. What's more, Blackwell ruled before the election that provisional ballots had to be cast in the correct precinct and that any cast at the wrong polling place would not be counted.

If 10 percent of the provisional ballots are rejected, then Kerry would need to get 97.6 percent of the remaining ones to overcome Bush's lead.

"There are a lot of conspiracy-theory folks out there thinking that, with a machine problem here and a long-line problem there and the provisional ballots, the result is in doubt," said Edward Foley, a professor at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law. "I have seen nothing to indicate that the result is in doubt."

But irregularities and problems have cropped up.

On Friday, officials in Franklin County — which includes Columbus, the state capital — conceded that they may have improperly counted votes for Bush because of a touch-screen voting-system malfunction. A precinct in the county reported a 4,000-vote margin won by Bush appeared to exceed the number of registered voters.

The touch-screen system in Franklin County is among the oldest and least reliable of the electronic voting machines in use, said David Dill, a Stanford University computer expert. Asked how an electronic voting machine could run up nearly 4,000 extra votes, Dill said anything from an internal misalignment to static electricity could cause an error.

"The point is that these machines are nowhere near reliable enough to depend on," Dill said.