Brunner wants rid of last 2 on elections board
One of the two Republicans said the complaint was political.
CLEVELAND (AP) -- A second Democratic elections board member in the state's most populous county quit Thursday, and Ohio's chief elections official filed a complaint to remove the two remaining members, both Republicans, over persistent voting problems.
Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, sent the 18-page complaint to the two remaining Cuyahoga County elections board members, chairman Robert Bennett, the head of the GOP in Ohio, and Sally Florkiewicz.
Brunner's office said the complaint was mailed to the elections board and was e-mailed to Bennett and Florkiewicz. It alleges the board is connected to various election glitches and cost problems. The board members had publicly said they are working to solve such problems and were searching for a new elections director.
Bennett said the complaint appeared political in nature.
"While today's filing by the Secretary of State carries a lot of political overtones, the course we are about to take is a judicial process. Therefore, I will have no further public comment on this matter and defer all questions on the advice of legal counsel," Bennett said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
Repeated calls to Florkiewicz' home phone went unanswered.
Brunner, who took office in January, said a removal hearing would begin April 2 in the Cleveland suburb of Euclid under the direction of William Owen, an assistant prosecutor from Delaware County in central Ohio. Brunner said she believes she has the power to remove the two after a hearing.
Resignations
A day after saying he wouldn't step down, board member Loree K. Soggs resigned Thursday.
After sleeping on it and getting over an "emotional hump," he felt resigning was the right thing to do, said Soggs, who serves as executive secretary of the Cleveland Building and Construction Trades Council, an umbrella organization over Cleveland-area building trades unions.
"I've tried to do everything I could to further the call for good and free elections," Soggs said.
Brunner had informed the board members Sunday night that they had to resign by Wednesday or face removal.
The other Democrat, attorney Edward C. Coaxum Jr., resigned by Brunner's Wednesday deadline from the board that oversees elections in the county that includes Cleveland and has about 1.3 million people.
Various problems
The complaint said board members ignored warnings, including one by its own outside monitor, that a recount of the 2004 presidential election was being conducted in violation of state rules.
The rules require some precincts to be randomly selected, with the hand-counted results compared to machine totals to check for accuracy. Instead, Brunner said, the board ignored warnings that sample precincts had been preselected and later certified the recount results.
Two board employees were convicted in the recount and were sentenced last week to 18 months in prison. The prosecution said the two were trying to avoid a lengthy and more costly full recount by preselecting precincts whose totals matched machine vote counts.
Brunner's complaint also said the board had failed to manage its finances and had underestimated the cost of last May's primary by 500,000.
The complaint also cited previously reported problems with elections in 2004, 2005 and 2006, including unsecured keys to ballot storage areas; shoddy work checking voter names, addresses and signatures; failure to make sure the number of voters matched the number of votes cast; poor checking of ballots; and inadequate poll worker training.
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