Ohio avoids ‘next Florida’ tag as Kerry concedes

JOHN KERRY’S concession of the US presidential race to Republican incumbent George Bush yesterday eased concerns that Ohio would emerge as a bitter battleground and delay the election’s outcome for weeks, in a replay of 2000.

State officials said they must still evaluate and count more than 135,000 provisional ballots and an unknown number of absentee ballots cast in Tuesday’s election, where Ohio’s 20 electoral votes came to represent the decisive prize.

But Kerry’s decision to concede with Bush leading in Ohio by 136,483 votes means the counting can proceed without party lawyers fighting at every turn for their candidate’s advantage.

Such a battle in Florida delayed the outcome of the 2000 presidential election for five weeks until the US Supreme Court ruled in Bush’s favour.

“I don’t think we were ever looking at another Florida,” law professor Steve Huefner of Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law said. “The margin of votes for Bush was too large for Kerry to overcome.”

The army of lawyers and strategists that had descended on Ohio’s ornate Capitol building in Columbus for potential legal battles would probably disband now, Huefner said.

Before Kerry decided to concede, Ohio election officials had said it could take days or weeks to award the state’s electoral votes, essential for either Bush or Kerry to capture a winning majority under the US Electoral College system.

The delay was due to the lengthy process needed to verify between 135,000 and 175,000 provisional ballots cast by voters who did not appear on the registration rolls or had moved but who declared themselves eligible.

Although some of Ohio’s votes were cast on punch-card ballots that caused many controversies over “hanging chads” in Florida’s counties, this presented less of an issue in Ohio due to a uniform statewide standard, Huefner said.

In any case, punch cards were primarily used in Republican-heavy rural counties and would have favoured Bush.

Ohio’s Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican, had said it would be impossible to say who won Ohio, if the difference between Bush and Kerry in the raw-vote total was smaller than the number of outstanding provisional votes. Blackwell had ordered local election officials not to even begin counting provisional ballots until noon today.

In 2000, when 100,000 provisional ballots were cast, Blackwell said about 90% of them were legitimate.