Ohio's 15th District, still undecided

I had to run out to the grocery store this evening--yes, I'm still sick, but there needs to be food in the house, and Demetrius is on a tight deadline. Once I got to the store, I made a mental note that I need to make a point of avoiding Kroger's on game day. I purposely avoid Meijer's on weekends, because it tends to be a Baffling Ordeal, and I get sensory overload even when I'm *not* feeling under the weather. Kroger, being a somewhat smaller store and not one of those "superstores" that sells everything, seems a little less overwhelming if I *have* to stop at the store during crowded weekend times.

That is, unless there's an OSU game playing, which does bad things for my concentration. I want to find stuff and get out, you know?

But the good news is, while I was there, in the commercial break during the game, I got to hear Mary Jo Kilroy's ad on the radio. It served as a reminder to me that I hadn't posted about that yet undecided race yet. Mary Jo, unlike John Kerry, did *not* concede. I suppose her opponent Deb Pryce finds that irksome. She is the Representative, who, in January 2005, said:

Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio, lauded Kerry's Nov. 3 concession and his decision not to join Thursday's challenge. "Apparently, such admirable qualities do not apply to certain extreme elements of Senator Kerry's own party," she said.

Of course, many of us thought it was plenty admirable to want all the votes counted, especially with Ken "80 pound cardstock" Blackwell overseeing that election.

Anyway, the ad I heard during the game was aimed at Ohio State University students, many of whom voted on provisional ballots because they did not have proper ID under the new voting rules. In the ad, Mary Jo encouraged people who had cast provisional ballots to call a number to verify that their vote had been counted. From her official campaign site:

Confusion over the new voter-ID requirement was the biggest problem observed by dozens of lawyers monitoring poll sites around the state, said Kent Markus, a Capital University law professor who coordinated the monitoring.

In the OSU area -- there were some precincts that voted as much as 42% provisonally.

Ohio law allows voters to cast a regular ballot even if the address on their ID doesn’t match the address in the poll book. But many voters around the state reported they were forced to vote provisionally by poll workers who thought otherwise.

Anyway, kudos to Mary Jo for *not* conceding while votes remain uncounted. I don't know if she'll win in the end or not, but democracy is definitely the loser if citizens are sent the message that their votes don't really matter.

For more information, see Mary Jo Kilroy's site, as well as The 15th by the numbers at Buckeye State Blog, and the Ohio 15th District blog, which is following this issue.

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