Elections board investigating fraud

LIMA - Possible voter fraud and potential disenfranchisement of voters kept the Allen County Board of Elections busy Thursday morning.

More than half the signatures submitted on petitions related to the payday lending ballot initiative have been rejected by county elections officials as not genuine. Three petitions in particular are going to get some extra scrutiny.

The board also had to consider whether to process vote-by-mail request cards sent by the John McCain presidential campaign.

Elections Director Keith Cunningham on Thursday updated board members on the possible voter fraud.

"The petitions that were submitted on behalf of the payday lending referendum were among the worst petitions I've seen in 10 years. We have clearly fraudulent petitions - forged names of people we know that have been deceased as long as three to five years. We just simply believe that kind of abuse of the petition system should not be tolerated and we will prosecute those people if we get the chance to."

The elections board voted unanimously to send three petitions, which appeared to have the same circulator, to the Allen County Prosecutor's Office for review.

Cunningham said elections staff reviewed 773 petitions and rejected more than half the 14,955 signatures as possibly forged. Elections staff accepted only 5,651 signatures while rejecting 8,663.

"Most importantly there is a system in place that allows the residents of Ohio to go to the ballot either with an initiative or a referendum of state law and we need to protect the integrity of that system," Cunningham said. "These were just the most blatant we came across. There were others."

With respect to the absentee ballot requests, Cunningham said the secretary of state's directive was a petty reason to disenfranchise voters.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner's office sent out a directive advising boards of elections that a check box on the form with a statement "I am a qualified elector and would like to receive an absentee ballot for the Nov. 4, 2008 general election" must be checked in order to be considered a valid request.

Cunningham sought clarification on the issue from the Allen County Prosecutor's Office.

"Unless the secretary of state can provide adequate basis for concluding that the box is a check-box and then also provide a valid legal foundation for her conclusion that the check-box must be marked in order for the application to be acceptable, I recommend that the board accept otherwise compliant cards that do not have a mark in the purported box next to the statement that the applicant is a qualified elector," Assistant Prosecutor Anthony J. Miller wrote in a Wednesday letter to the elections board.

The board unanimously accepted the advice.

"The point is they are considered a legal request for absentee ballots," board Chairman Gary Frueh said. "We'll move forward until we learn otherwise."