Judge in Ohio Tells Counties to Preserve 2004 Ballots

The Associated Press

Friday 08 September 2006

Columbus, Ohio - A judge ordered Ohio's county elections boards on Thursday to preserve ballots from the 2004 presidential election, a move activists hope will help prove accusations of fraud.

Federal law requires the counties to keep the ballots for 22 months after the election, which was this week.

The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by plaintiffs including the Ohio Voter Rights Alliance for Democracy and the head of a Columbus neighborhood association that accuses Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell of depriving many blacks of the right to vote in 2004 by distributing fewer voting machines per person in black neighborhoods.

The suit seeks to remove Mr. Blackwell, a Republican, from overseeing the coming Nov. 7 election.

Mr. Blackwell, who is black, has drawn criticism for his oversight of the 2004 election and his simultaneous honorary role on President Bush's re-election committee.

Mr. Bush beat Senator John Kerry in Ohio by 118,000 votes, gaining the electoral votes that kept him in the White House.

Cliff Arnebeck, a lawyer who represents the plaintiffs, asked Mr. Blackwell to order the state's 88 counties to secure the ballots. Mr. Blackwell said he lacked the authority to do so. In Thursday's decision, Judge Algenon L. Marbley of Federal District Court ordered the counties to preserve the ballots until further notice.

Plaintiffs hope that by preserving the ballots they will be able to collect evidence for their accusations that some punch-card ballots may have been prepunched, rendering them invalid if punched again, and that some absentee ballots in Republican-leaning counties were counted twice, Mr. Arnebeck said.

"In order to nail that down, you want to have access to all the ballots," he said.

A message seeking comment was left Thursday evening with a spokesman for the secretary of state's office.

In January 2005, Mr. Arnebeck, then representing similar clients, dropped a challenge to Ohio's 2004 election results after the Ohio chief justice, Thomas Moyer, called evidence in the case "woefully inadequate."