Opinion ID: 183767
Heading Depth: 6
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Statewide Implications

Text: It has also been argued that the district court's equal-protection analysis, which focused on countywide equal treatment of ballots cast in the wrong precinct because of poll-worker error, created another equal-protection problem one level up. That is, certain wrong-precinct ballots are ordered to be counted only in Hamilton County, and not in the rest of Ohio. According to Secretary Husted, the district court would be required to order the same investigative process statewide that was applied to Hamilton County's provisional ballots in order to avoid subjecting provisional ballots across the state to differential treatment. This particular Board, however, did not treat equally the provisional ballots cast within its own county, and that is the equal-protection problem that we address. Only voters in Hamilton County are eligible to vote for Hamilton County Juvenile Court Judge. Because voters in other counties may not cast votes for a local judgeship, remedying poll-worker error with respect to votes in this race does not result in unequal treatment of voters outside Hamilton County. The counting of provisional ballots in a Hamilton County race does not impact whether voters who cast ballots in other races are treated equally when compared to similarly situated voters in those races. Statewide equal-protection implications could arise, however, to the extent that the ballots at issue include candidates for district and statewide races that transcend county lines. See Bush, 531 U.S. at 106-07, 121 S.Ct. 525. But, as a practical matter, no statewide 2010 election is subject to a vote-counting dispute, and all statewide elections are now deemed final under Ohio law. See OHIO REV.CODE ANN. § 3505.32(A) (providing an eighty-one-day deadline from the date of the election to amend the canvass of election returns). And, to the extent that Ohio election procedures present equal-protection and due-process problems in local contests in other counties, they may be resolved in separate litigation. Furthermore, Hunter argues that a statewide equal-protection problem already exists, regardless of whether Hamilton County provisional ballots are investigated. Hunter provided evidence that four other counties in Ohio counted provisional ballots cast in the correct location but wrong precinct in the November 2010 election. R.20-7 (Board Minutes for Lucas, Seneca, Williams, and Trumbull counties). This evidence suggests that, despite the contrary instruction of Ohio law, individual counties have already adopted their own standards and applied differential treatment to provisional ballots. In any event, we need not address whether either the initial counting of the 27 miscast ballots or the subsequent provisional-ballot investigation rises to a level of unconstitutional inequality when considered in a hypothetical statewide challenge. The inconsistent treatment of provisional ballots across Ohio counties and the precise degree of inequality from county to county tolerated by the Constitution is not at issue here. See Daniel P. Tokaji, Leave It to the Lower Courts: On Judicial Intervention in Election Administration, 68 OHIO ST. L.J. 1065, 1069-70 (2007) (describing application of the principle of equal treatment to voters across counties in matters of election administration). We instead affirm the likelihood that the intrajursidiction unequal treatment undertaken by the Hamilton County Board is constitutionally impermissible. The Board arbitrarily treated one set of provisional ballots differently from others, and that unequal treatment violates the Equal Protection Clause.