Third-party candidates want second recount of Ohio presidential vote

JAY COHEN

Associated Press   30 December 2004

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Two third-party presidential candidates asked a federal court Thursday to force a second recount of the Ohio presidential vote, alleging county elections boards altered votes and didn't follow proper procedures in the recount that ended this week.

Lawyers for Green Party candidate David Cobb and Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party made their request in U.S. District Court in Columbus as part of an ongoing lawsuit that was originally filed by a county board of elections to stop the recount.

The two candidates, who received less than 0.3 percent of the Ohio vote, paid $113,600 for a statewide recount after the vote was certified earlier this month by the secretary of state.

Ohio and its 20 electoral votes tipped the race to President Bush when Sen. John Kerry conceded the morning after the Nov. 2 vote.

Counties finished the recount Tuesday. Bush won the state by 118,457 votes over Kerry, according to unofficial results provided to The Associated Press by the 88 counties.

"We've documented in this filing how this recount was not conducted in accordance with uniform standards throughout Ohio" as required by the U.S. Constitution, said John Bonifaz, a lawyer from the National Voting Right Institute representing the candidates.

Ohio law requires an elections board to manually recount a randomly ed 3 percent of ballots. If the totals match certified results for those precincts, all the county's votes are then machine-counted. If the hand count is off, a county must manually recount all its ballots.

The filing alleges counties did not randomly precincts for the manual recount and some workers altered votes to prevent a full hand count. It also alleges that observers were not treated uniformly across the state.

Bonifaz said the filing is based on the experiences of Green Party representatives who observed the recount.

Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, called the filing "baseless accusations."

"The ballots were counted in Ohio, they were counted again, they were recounted. The election is over," LoParo said.

Bonifaz said he wasn't sure when U.S. District Judge Edmund Sargus would schedule a hearing on the filing.