Maybe.

Courtney sends this fascinating story on how officials in GOP-heavy Hamilton County, Ohio were up until 4am counting write-in ballots from late-voting Republicans:

Joe Deters appeared headed back to the prosecutor’s office, ending an extraordinary 10 weeks of scandal and turmoil in one of the county’s most important offices.

Deters lead his opponent Fanon Rucker, 59 percent to 44 percent, with 97 percent of 1,103 precincts reporting early Wednesday. An official at the Hamilton Board of Elections said as of 6 a.m. Wednesday no additional updates will be available until the official results are released in 10 days. The delay is due to the large number of ballots that need to be reviewed…

He replaces the incumbent Republican prosecutor, Mike Allen, who withdrew from the race in September after admitting to a 3½ -year affair with a female employee who has sued him for sexual harassment…

Results in the race came more slowly – with officials counting ballots past 4 a.m. — than in other contests because elections workers were hand counting tens of thousands of write-in ballots.

About 50 percent of the Hamilton County voters who turned out to vote, wrote in a candidate for prosecutor.

Deters, 47, and Rucker, 32, both ran as write-in candidates – a first in Hamilton County politics – because they jumped into the race just six weeks ago after Allen dropped out…

…Both candidates expected a long, tense night as a few dozen elections officials counted the write-in ballots. About 400,000 people voted in Tuesday’s election, and about half of them cast write-in ballots.

“I don’t have, nor could I have, the percent of people who are writing in,” said John Williams, director of the county’s board of elections. “We are going to work until we finish.”

Republicans turned out heavy and late to write in Deters, likely offsetting the late votes the Kerry campaign was counting in urban Cleveland and Cincinnati precincts.

Bush got 11,000 more votes in Hamilton County than he did in 2000, but about the same percentage. If provisional ballots tighten Ohio to within ten thousand votes or so, the Hamilton County sex scandal could prove to be an interesting footnote to this election.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004 at 10:08 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.