The closest remaining House race is OH-15. Steve Stivers leads Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy by 393 votes, with 27,000 uncounted provisional ballots. Stivers objects to 1000 of them because he says voters did not both sign and print their names.
On Saturday, I diaried here about the circumstances of the court challenge. Stivers filed the case at the Ohio Supreme Court, but Ohio SoS Brunner sought consolidation with another case in federal court.
The federal judge issued his ruling on Monday on which court had jurisdiction. Now that it will be heard in federal court, the hearing on the merits will occur.
Disputed provisional ballots that could decide the 15th Congressional District race will not be counted until at least Friday morning, giving a federal judge time to consider legal arguments and make a ruling, the parties agreed today.
U.S. District Court Judge Algenon L. Marbley said he plans to rule by 5 p.m. Thursday after both sides in the dispute file their legal briefs by the end of the day tomorrow [Tuesday].
Continued:
At issue are an estimated 1,000 provisional ballots that are in dispute because voters failed to both print and sign their names on the ballot envelopes or for some other defect. ...
Reading his ruling from the bench this morning, Marbley argued that case belongs in federal court in part because it deals with an interpretation on a court order from the pending federal case as well as federal equal-protection issues.
Marbley noted, for example, that the 15th Congressional District includes portions of Franklin, Madison and Union counties – and that those counties use different provisional ballot envelopes.