Ohio was a confusing patchwork of litigation and election board hearings on Thursday as Democratic and Republican lawyers waged courtroom battles from Cincinnati to Newark, New Jersey, over the rights of tens of thousands of Ohioans to cast ballots next week.
At the heart of the legal jousting was an effort by the state Republican Party to challenge 23,000 new voter registrations in 62 counties. On Wednesday, Judge Susan Dlott of US District Court in Cincinnati temporarily blocked hearings for those challenges in six counties, including the state's two largest, Cuyahoga and Franklin.
PHOTO: AP
But on Thursday, Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, and the Franklin County Board of Elections appealed Dlott's order, seeking to proceed with hearings yesterday and through the weekend.
Election officials in Cuyahoga County, which encompasses Cleveland and where 17,000 challenges have been filed, said they might have run out of time to hold hearings.
But officials in Franklin County, which includes Columbus, said they might proceed with hearings on Sunday if their appeal succeeds. Many smaller counties were also proceeding with plans for hearings over the next three days.
At the same time, several other counties that were not covered by Dlott's order proceeded with hearings on Thursday, with mixed results.
The Republicans brought challenges last week against 35,000 voters after letters sent by the party or election officials to those addresses were returned as undeliverable -- evidence, the Republicans said, of possible fraud.
About 12,000 of the challenges have been dismissed by election boards or withdrawn by the party.
Democrats have argued that most of the challenges were against legal voters, including several in the military.
In Akron on Thursday, Summit County election officials dismissed all 976 challenges and gave those voters immunity from challenge on Election Day as well. Even Republican members of the county election board were critical of the state party after an angry hearing.
BURDEN OF PROOF
"The state party made us look bad," said Alex Arshinkoff, the county Republican chairman and one of two Republican members of the board of elections. He said the party's failure to provide evidence had allowed the Democrats to shift the burden of proof to the challengers instead of the challenged.
Meanwhile, republican claims that about 1,000 ineligible voters have cast or plan to cast ballots added to the mounting controversy that has brought thousands of lawyers to Florida ahead of Tuesday's presidential election.
The claim, denounced by Democrats as political intimidation in the face of a tight and potentially decisive race, is but the latest in a string of partisan allegations of irregularities in the state that held up the 2000 presidential for five weeks.
Republican party advisor Mindy Tucker Fletcher said 925 convicted felons, who are not allowed to vote under Florida law, have either done so or requested absentee ballots.
"This is evidence of the law being broken," she said.
But Democrats claim the names were culled from a list of 48,000 alleged felons which Republican State Governor Jeb Bush -- a brother of the president -- was forced to scrap after it was found to be flawed and to include a number of people whose voting rights had been restored.
"This is one more step to disenfranchise voters by the Republican Party of Florida," said Scott Maddox, chairman of the state's Democratic Party.
The Bush campaign claims its rivals' have registered thousands of ineligible voters in Florida, including many who have also signed up to cast their ballots in other states.
Supporters of Bush's Democrat rival John Kerry, for their part, insist the Republicans are going all out to minimize turnout by challenging as many votes as possible, particularly in African-American districts where Democrats traditionally enjoy strong support.
The Republicans in turn dismissed the claim, which they said was straight out of the Democrats "minority intimidation playbook."
INTIMIDATION
"Today we are seeing these left-leaning groups follow the instructions ... of the voting manual which instructs Democrat operatives to allege intimidation where none exists," said Republican senior advisor Robert Traynham.
Both sides have deployed thousands of lawyers to Florida amid fears of irregularities reminescent of the 2000 election that was marked by a stunning number of lawsuits and vote recounts and whose outcome remains controversial to this day.
Tens of thousands of ballots have mysteriosly gone missing in Florida's Broward County, where local authorities said they were mailing substitutes for the absentee ballots they claim were sent out but that voters apparently never received.
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