OHIO Despite concession, election officials still must count provisional ballots

Workers will be verifying the ballots under supervision.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- While the urgency has passed to count thousands of provisional ballots that were holding up selection of the president, Ohio election officials still need to get the ballots tallied.
The secretary of state's office released a count Wednesday of 155,337 provisional ballots. Unofficial vote totals from Tuesday's election put President Bush ahead by 136,000 votes, but Kerry made it clear in his concession speech that there were not enough outstanding votes for him to win the state and capture the presidency. Experts say provisional ballots do not depart significantly from the overall vote.
Provisional ballots -- required in all states for the first time this year -- are used when voters say they are properly registered but their names are not on the registration rolls.
The ballots are later counted if elections officials determine the voters' registrations are valid.
Election officials and experts say counting the ballots continues to be important despite Kerry's exit.
"Those ballots are votes," Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, said on Wednesday. "Every vote that is legally cast should be counted."
Ready to verify
LoParo said elections workers, under the supervision of Republican and Democratic staff, will spend at least the next 10 days verifying that provisional voters live in the precinct where they cast ballots and meet other voting requirements, such as age limit and citizenship.
The ballots that are verified will remain in sealed envelopes and then will be tabulated as part of the process counties go through for their official count of the votes, which must be completed by Dec. 1.
Most of the provisional ballots will end up being counted, LoParo said. In 2000, about 107,000 of the 123,518 provisional ballots were counted.
The GOP sued Ohio over the ballots even before polls closed Tuesday.
The lawsuit demanded better ground rules for evaluating the ballots, and a guarantee that they could watch, alongside Democrats, as state officials prepare the provisional ballots to be counted.
LoParo said no changes in the rules are necessary. "We feel that we have clear, statewide standards for counting provisional ballots," he said.
Working together
Mark Weaver, an attorney representing Ohio Republicans, said the GOP told a federal judge that it thinks it can work with Blackwell's office on how to handle the ballots and that no court order is necessary for now.
A message seeking comment was left with Democratic party spokesman Myron Marlin.
The liberal-leaning Election Protection Coalition said its Internet and telephone hot lines logged 126 provisional-ballot complaints in Ohio involving voters not allowed to cast provisional ballots after not receiving absentee ballots, said Maria Blanco, executive director for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, a coalition member. After a woman sued on behalf of voters who didn't receive absentee ballots on time, all were allowed to cast provisional ballots.
Whether the provisional ballots still to be counted affect the results matters less than whether the ballots were handled properly to begin with, Jon Greenbaum, director of the Voting Rights Project for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, a coalition member.
"We're thinking of voters being disenfranchised," Greenbaum said. "It's something we're going to look at."