Blackwell To Testify On Ohio Elections Before Committee

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The
state’s chief elections official has a message for those who say Ohio’s
Nov. 2 election was fraught with unpreparedness, mistakes and fraud:
Take a closer look.

Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell was
scheduled to testify at a field hearing of the U.S. House
Administration Committee on Monday, more than a month after failing to
appear at the panel’s first post-election hearing in Washington.

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The hearing is scheduled to begin at about 2 p.m., NBC 4 reported.

U.S.
Rep. Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican and the committee’s chairman, took
Blackwell’s absence as a snub, especially because Blackwell was in
Washington the same day to lead a meeting of the nonpartisan Campaign
Finance Institute.

Blackwell said he couldn’t appear at fellow
Republican Ney’s hearing because of the previously scheduled institute
meeting. Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, another Republican,
also did not appear, citing a previous commitment in her state.

Blackwell
was expected to tell Ney’s committee on Monday that most of his
critics’ complaints about counting provisional ballots, long lines at
polling places and ballots thrown out because of voting irregularities
were groundless.

"Overall, Ohio has a good system and it
performed well under extraordinary stress. And yes, it has some
weaknesses," Blackwell said in testimony prepared for the committee.

Ohio
and its 20 electoral votes were key to President George W. Bush’s
victory over Sen. John Kerry. Bush carried the state by 118,000 votes,
or 2 percentage points.

A report prepared by the Democratic staff
of the House Judiciary Committee accused Ohio elections officials of
disenfranchising minority and Democratic voters by misallocating voting
machines in their districts and restricting the use of provisional
ballots. Blackwell’s order that registrations must be on a certain
weight of paper also drew fire in the staff report.

Blackwell has denied the staff’s allegations.

"It
was a stunning and disgraceful display demonstrating that there are
those in Congress who are very willing to cast aside the Constitution
and the lawfully certified vote of the people to wage a nasty and
disingenuous partisan attack," Blackwell said in his testimony.