In Ohio Courts, It’s Almost Like Florida in 2000

As Jeff Hirsh, a television news reporter here, rushed to a federal court hearing Friday on a usually obscure issue of election law -- his second election-law hearing of the day -- he turned to a visitor with a greeting:

“Welcome to Florida -- minus the beach.”

With 20 electoral votes, Ohio may be critical to victory for either President Bush or Senator John F. Kerry. Election-related litigation is rapidly spreading through its courts.

On Friday, there was action on three fronts in the stately Potter Stewart courthouse. The building was erected in 1936 -- the year Franklin D. Roosevelt won all but two states in the presidential election.

Other cases erupted in cities across the state, including Columbus, Akron and Cleveland.

Outside the courthouse, a woman proclaiming, “God is pro-life” handed out leaflets attacking Kerry for his position on abortion rights. Another woman handed out brightly colored flyers declaring, “Stand Up and Be Counted! Vote Democratic.”

Inside, the judges moved through cases that could determine the rights of thousands of potential voters Tuesday.

First came a ruling from a three-judge panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over federal courts in Ohio and three other Midwestern states. The judges blocked plans by election officials to hold mass hearings on some 23,000 challenges to newly registered voters that Republicans had filed.

The Republicans claim many of the registrations are fraudulent; Democrats say the other side is trying to intimidate voters.

The appeals court judges, upholding a ruling issued earlier in the week by District Judge Susan Dlott, said they were “mindful of the practical difficulty of ... arranging and conducting literally thousands of hearings for all challenged voters between today’s date and Nov. 2” without violating the rights of individual voters.

As that ruling came down from the appeals court’s offices, Dlott, a 55-year-old former prosecutor who was appointed to the court a decade ago by President Clinton, moved to her courtroom to prepare for round two.

Despite her ruling, at least two counties had gone ahead with hearing challenges. In one of them, the southern Allen County, officials disqualified 55 potential voters whose registrations had been challenged by Republicans.

That violated the judge’s order, said Virginia Whitman, a lawyer representing challenged voters. The 55 voters from Allen County should be reinstated on the rolls, Whitman said.

After about an hour of argument, Dlott ordered Ohio’s secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, to direct election officials in all of the state’s 88 counties to cease holding challenge hearings. The judge scheduled another hearing for Monday on Whitman’s request to reinstate the disqualified voters.

Dlott moved on to a larger courtroom, where the issue was not challenges filed in advance, but the state’s law allowing voters to be challenged on election day. Marian and Donald Spencer, longtime civil rights activists, had gone to court arguing that Ohio’s law on challenges is too broad and is a vestige of segregation-era statutes whose goal was to disenfranchise African Americans.

“We don’t want the kind of disaster here that we had in Florida,” said Donald Spencer, 84. “We see this as a terrible thing for us in the North.... We’re very concerned.”

Dlott started hearing testimony Thursday afternoon. Among the witnesses was Timothy Burke, chairman of the county election board here. Although Burke is a defendant in the case, his testimony indicated sympathy for the plaintiff’s case.

Burke said that although Ohio has had procedures in place for years to challenge a voter’s bona fides -- such as age, citizenship and place of residence -- he has never seen anything like the plans to use them this year.

Typically, he said, parties use their precinct executives as election observers, who have the right to raise such challenges. This time, Burke said, Republicans have stated that they will use specially trained challengers at 251 of Hamilton county’s 1013 precincts -- 250 of which are overwhelmingly black.

Michael Barrett, also a member of the county election board and a Republican leader, said he thought it was “unfortunate that race has been injected into this situation.”

Evidence indicates there have been illegitimate registrations, Barrett said. He added that the precincts had been selected not because of their racial makeup, but because Vice President Al Gore had gotten at least 60% of the vote there in 2000.

Blackwell tried to quell the controversy, issuing a statement that he had asked state Atty. Gen. Jim Petro to tell the federal courts in Cincinnati and Akron that “all challengers of all parties shall be excluded from polling places throughout the state.”

Petro quickly refused, saying the suggestion from his fellow Republican -- and rival for the state’s governorship -- was “unlawful.”

“Certainly, no challenger should engage in conduct that is obviously intended to harass or discourage any lawfully registered voter,” Petro said, but “until the law is finally declared to be unconstitutional, it is a valid law granting Ohio’s citizens the right to be challengers if they have followed the proper procedure to do so.”

David Sullivan, the Columbus attorney who heads the Democrats’ “voter protection” program in Ohio, issued a statement that his party would have thousands of volunteers working on election day, but that none would challenge a Republican voter at the polls. He predicted that the entire controversy would increase turnout.

The hearing continued in Dlott’s courtroom shortly after 8 p.m. She ordered both sides to file briefs by Sunday morning and come back for another hearing at 7 p.m., one hour before Bush’s scheduled rally here.

Whitman, an active Democrat, said she had never handled an election law case before.

“It’s a bit nuts, but well worth it. We’re doing important work here,” she said.