2 dispute ballot disqualification
Nearly 2,000 petition signatures simply vanished in the hands of Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a man whom Brunner disqualified from the May ballot for attorney general alleged yesterday.
Kenton lawyer Steve Christopher, a conservative Republican who had sought Ohio's top legal job, was one of five candidates Brunner scrubbed from the ballot Friday for failing to turn in 1,000 valid signatures of registered Ohio voters.
While three have accepted Brunner's judgment, Christopher and a U.S. Senate hopeful are accusing the state's chief elections official of bungling the signature-verification process. The would-be Senate candidate, Traci "TJ" Johnson, had hoped to run in the Democratic primary in which Brunner is a candidate.
While Johnson is alleging a conflict of interest on Brunner's part, Christopher's charges are even more explosive. In effect, the lawyer says the secretary of state simply lost petition forms containing 1,962 signatures. His campaign says it turned in 2,750 signatures in all.
"There's definitely an accountability issue here when 1,962 signatures simply disappear," said Mark Lucas, a spokesman for Christopher.
Lucas said the candidate - who has sought backing from Tea Party groups - will continue his campaign while going to the Ohio Supreme Court to secure a spot on the ballot. Christopher wants to run in the Republican primary against Mike DeWine, a former U.S. senator and Ohio lieutenant governor, for the right to challenge incumbent Attorney General Richard Cordray, a Democrat.
Brunner's office said the phantom signatures never existed.
The secretary of state said Christopher's campaign submitted 788 signatures, of which 638 were deemed valid by county boards of elections. The candidate turned in 104 part-petitions, with 27 lines available for signatures on each part-petition, so the maximum number of signatures is 2,808, Brunner's office said.
The secretary of state called on Christopher to put up or shut up.
"Mr. Christopher is an attorney. Most attorneys I know keep a copy for their file when they file a document with a court or a public office," Brunner said in a news release in which she noted her own background as a lawyer and judge. "It's what we're taught to do in law school to keep good records for our clients, even when we may be our own client."
Christopher's wife, Jill, said the campaign has copies of about 2,000 signatures that it submitted to Brunner's office. The campaign doesn't have records of the 750 others because they were collected in the final hours before they were submitted Feb. 18, she said.
Volunteers for the campaign have been confirming the validity of signatures against the secretary of state's voter rolls, Jill Christopher said, with a validity rate approaching 80 percent.
Johnson couldn't be reached yesterday but told the Associated Press that she plans to challenge her disqualification based on conflict of interest by Brunner.
But Brunner spokesman Jeff Ortega noted that the petition forms Johnson submitted were reviewed not by Brunner but by bipartisan county elections boards, which found that she was 166 signatures short.
Ortega also pointed out that Brunner formally delegated authority to certify the primary ballots last week to Assistant Secretary of State Michael Rankin to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance of impropriety.
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Oh, and that number (2750) is not from the campaign; it's from the Secretary of State official who signed for the signatures. Somewhere between that official and the county boards of election, the signatures were lost, and Christopher can prove it.
You see though, this is how BO won Ohio in the race for President. All those ACORN votes that were counted... this is how it happened. Then of course, she's practically handed the Senate seat. Nice coincidence, don't you think?
I'd love to see her or whoever is doing this in her office to go to prison for voter fraud!
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