Some bad news:
State Sen. Steve Stivers (R) leads Franklin County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy (D) by about 400 votes out of about 259,555 ballots counted so far in Ohio’s 15th Congressional district.
But that number is likely to change starting Saturday, when officials will begin counting 26,000 provisional ballots from Franklin County. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Friday afternoon that Franklin County could not count an additional 1,000 provisional ballots without voter names and signatures on the envelopes – a ruling that allowed election officials to proceed with counting the remaining 26,000 provisional ballots in what was one of the closest House races in the country.
Kilroy still has a good shot at picking this one up (see DavidNYC’s analysis for more), and counting is now resuming on the additional ballots (why they had to be shelved during the legal fracas is something I don’t have an answer for):
Franklin County Board of Elections spokesman Ben Piscitelli said officials hope to finish counting the provisional ballots on Saturday and certify the election on Sunday.
And then, of course, comes the probable recount (automatic if the difference is less than 0.5%), which could begin as soon as December 12th and take an estimated five days. So if Franklin County certifies their totals on Sunday, as planned, we’re probably going to have to wait until around the 17th to get a definitive winner.
Kilroy almost certainly has this once the absentees are counted.
26,000 ballots just sit there while 1000 are discussed? What is wrong with these people? Count the 26,000, and if one candidate or the other leads by 5000+ votes, who the hell cares about the 1000. If the margin was still 200 or something, sure, now fight over them.
Why has every other place counted the votes they can count, except this one place? Everybody has some questionable ballots.
Just plain weird.
It’s worthy of a banana republic. The sheer number of provisional ballots in this district call into question the competence of Franklin county officials. Kilroy will still probably win, but this should not happen again. 10% of all ballots are PROVISIONAL?! What a fiasco.
I think that it would be HYSTERICAL if the remaining 26,000 ballots gave a Kilroy such a narrow win that Stivers/GOPers appealed today’s ruling to SCOTUS.
(If Drudge uses that stupid red flashing bubble gum light, what’s a good irony alert? Purple? A blinking strobe? Black light? Can you do that on the net?)
[Of course, what I both hope and expect is that Kilroy will win with a margin over a thousand votes.
Oh, and BTW, our “recounts” are really “recounts”… it’s more like a spot check of 5% of the votes.
If you looked at the Roll Call article, you realize a real problem in the “Kilroy is the inevitable winner” scenario.
A significant number of Franklin County votes goes to the 12th district, not the 15th.
A little back of the envelope math tells me that only 54% of the ballots cast in Franklin County were in the 15th district, while 46% of them were in the 12th district.
So, it is not 26,000 ballots in the race to be counted, but probably closer to 14,000 votes.
If those 14K ballots are distributed proportionally by the election day voting patterns in Franklin County, Kilroy would pick up 680 votes.
Enough to win, but by 200-300 votes. Enough for a lot of legal wrangling still to come.