Via Hypothetically Speaking
http://www.loganselm.blogspot.com
That sucking sound? The would be Blackwell's career rapidly going down the drain.
The headline in today's Dispatch: Judge blasts Blackwell.
That would U.S. District Judge James G. Carr who verbally smacked Secretary of State Kenny Blackwell for "failure to do his duty."
From the Dispatch (http://www.dispatch.com/election/election-local.php?story=dispatch/2004/10/21/20041021-A1-00.html&am
p;rfr=nwsl):
U.S. District Judge James G. Carr in Toledo also suggested that Blackwell risked denying large numbers of Ohioans the right to vote on Nov. 2 and "apparently seeks to accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000."
. . .
"I cannot be confident . . . that Blackwell will, indeed, fulfill his obligation to this court, Ohio?s election officials, and Ohio?s voters," the judge wrote.
. . .
"The exigencies requiring the relief being ordered herein are due to the failure of [Blackwell] to fulfill his duty not only to this court. . . but more importantly, to his failure to do his duty as secretary of state to ensure that the election laws are upheld and enforced."
Blackwell response was to label Carr a "left-wing judge." Carr a left-winger? I don't think so. Smart? Probably. He graduated from Harvard law and taught at the Univ. of Toledo law school before serving for several years in the Lucas County prosecutor's office. In 1979, he became a U.S. Magistrate Judge in Toledo. He was appointed to the U.S. District Court in 1994 by Clinton, but that hardly makes him a lefty.
One of the main legal disputes in Ohio at this point is over the meaning of the term "jurisdiction" in HAVA. Provisional ballots don't have to be supplied if a person is shows up to vote in the wrong "jurisdiction." Blackwell has tried to narrow the definition to mean precinct.
Carr, however, ruled that a jurisdiction is a county, paving the way for voters to have much broader access to provisional ballots that should be counted.
Carr also blasted Blackwell for waiting for 23 months after the passage of HAVA to issue guidelines for the provisional ballots and for not playing a leading role in getting Ohio state law to conform with HAVA.