Howard Wilkinson @ The Enquirer has an article on the long road ahead for Paul Hackett.

The part of the article that really stood out for me was on the “Vote glitch” in Hamilton County:

Schmidt’s victory over former Congressman Bob McEwen was even more impressive than it first seemed.

When all seven counties had reported their votes to the Hamilton County Board of Elections Tuesday night, Schmidt led McEwen by 705 votes. But when Hamilton County Elections Director John Williams came to work Wednesday morning, he found a second corrected version of Clermont County’s final results on his fax machine.

The new totals increased Schmidt’s lead to 2,667 votes.

Williams said Clermont County officials explained to him that one of their workers accidentally marked an earlier report with the word “final” and sent it to the Hamilton County board, where all the county reports were being collected.

“It was just a mistake and didn’t change the result, so no harm done,” Williams said.


That last sentence is one that’s been uttered an awful lot by Ohio election officials lately. It reminds me of my retail management days when a clerk after counting out their register would be over $20 and say “hey… what does it matter… we’re ahead anyway,” after which we would send them to go get the register tapes and spend the night trying to figure out what went wrong. Man, I would love it if people treated their votes with the same level of respect as an owner of a 7-11 treats the $1.39 you spend on a cherry Slurpeetm. Good thing we’ve got those loyal officials on the election boards making sure everything’s safe and sound. SNARF

Tasteless insider muckraker The Whistleblower provides an interesting aside:

“Mean Jean” was in fourth place in the polls as late as Friday, and somehow, she pulled it off. Even she couldn’t explain how it happened.


Ohio… so much to discover!