Yesterday, GOPer Steve “Steve” Stivers was leading Mary Jo Kilroy by 321 votes in Ohio’s 15th District. The AP has corrected and updated their wildly wrong tally, and now that lead is down to 146 votes (and so says the Columbus Dispatch).
There are about 10,000 outstanding provisional and absentee ballots left to be counted, with 60-70% of those coming from Franklin County, where Kilroy edged Stivers by 48-43 in the count so far. The other ballots appear to be friendlier to Stivers, and one GOP operative quoted by the Politico says that this race will come down to less than 100 votes.
In 2006, Kilroy was trailing in the initial count by 3000 votes, and ended up only 1000 votes (or so) shy after provisionals were added and the recount kicked in. Let’s hope for some similar gains this time.
If more of the absentee, provisional ballots are from OSU, Columbus proper-60%-70% remaining, Kilroy will win with a slim margin.
This district was a classic GOP redrawl to keep it in Republican hands putting in Madison and Union Counties to offset Franklin County.
Plus the GOP threw everything they had at this district to keep it, literally.
I know the district very well; was born and raised in a Columbus NW suburb.
My parents still live in the district 43 years and counting.
Always voted Democrat.
It will be close,
COME ON MARY JO!!
BLUEISGOOD.
According to the Ohio SOS website.
http://vote.sos.state.oh.us/pl…
Stivers, Steve (R) 45.67% 123,322
Kilroy, Mary Jo (D) 45.55% 123,001
None of the provisionals have been counted. There were 35,000 voters in Franklin County who cast provisional ballots due to an error that was corrected in the middle of the day. Add to that another 5,000 ballots of other kinds not yet counted (including absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day but not yet received, and overseas military absentee ballots) and there are more than 40,000 ballots yet to be counted.
By the way, the margin dropped from 321 to 146 due to the counting of paper ballots that were not scanned in the polling places, but instead placed in a separate emergency ballot box for later counting (voters had the option to do this if they didn’t want to wait in line to scan their ballots). The emergency ballot box was also to be used in the case of ballot scanner malfunctions, but I haven’t heard that this happened.
I’m exceedingly optimistic about this race.