8,099 Cuyahoga ballots ruled invalid

The questions about provisional ballots haven't gotten any easier, but there is a preliminary answer to how many of the controversial ballots will be discarded in Cuyahoga County.

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections voted Monday to reject one out of three of the 24,472 provisional ballots cast in the Nov. 2 election.

The bulk of the 8,099 invalidated ballots were determined to have been cast by nonregistered voters or registered voters who cast their ballots in the wrong precinct. Voters received provisional ballots at the polls on Election Day if their names did not appear on the voter rolls.

Among Ohio's 88 counties, Cuyahoga County had the largest number of the controversial ballots, which pre-election predictions had said could rival the hanging chad as a blemish on official election results.

In the 2000 election, about 17 percent of provisional ballots were invalidated, compared with 33 percent in this election.

The numbers may fluctuate slightly as elections workers finalize vote counts in the last week before the board votes Monday to certify the election results, said Michael Vu, the county's elections director.

As county elections workers stood watch over a hand truck bearing 10 boxes stuffed with invalidated ballots, an ensemble of lawyers, professors and others who were active in voter registration drives made it clear that the board's decision won't quell the lingering disquiet about the possibility that some legitimate votes won't be counted.

During the 2½ hours the board meeting was delayed, lawyers and elections volunteers swapped tallies, analyses and stories about Election Day mishaps, many of which they offered in testimony after the board vote.

Confusion among poll workers about provisional-ballot procedures resulted in inconsistent, and sometimes erroneous, directions to voters, and some legitimate voter registrations never made the official rolls because of administrative errors, according to testimony.

Seventy percent of the rejected ballots, or 5,595, won't count because there was no record of their registration.

"I find it inconceivable that over 5,000 voters in the county would wait an hour in the pouring rain to vote if they haven't registered," said Dr. Norm Robbins, a neurosciences professor at Case Western Reserve University who volunteered for the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition.

Robert Bennett, the elections board chairman who also chairs the Ohio Republican Party, said provisional ballots were cross-checked by name and address before they were disqualified. But he acknowledged that errors may have seeped into the system.

"We like to think it's a perfect system, but it's not," Bennett said. "We try to get it as perfect as we can."

Provisional ballots that were accepted have been routed to the balloting department, where they will be checked for double voting. Seven ballots already have been put in that category, Vu said.

On Monday afternoon, the elections board posted the lists of provisional voters whose ballots were accepted and rejected. Vu said any concrete evidence that might reinstate discarded ballots will be considered this week, before the tally is finalized.

"Elections will never be perfect, because there's a human factor involved," Vu said in an interview after the meeting.

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