COLUMBUS, Ohio - The counting of more than 150,000 provisional ballots cast in Ohio will go forward, despite John Kerry's concession that President Bush had won the state's 20 electoral votes, election officials said Wednesday.
Elections workers planned to spend the next 10 days verifying that each provisional voter lives in the precinct where he or she cast a ballot and meets age and citizenship requirements.
"The pressure is off in the eyes of the media," said Jeff La Rue, spokesman for the Franklin County Board of Elections. "The pressure to count every vote and validate every vote that is a valid vote - that pressure is never off."
Provisional ballots - required in all states for the first time this year - are used when voters believe they are properly registered but their names do not appear in registration records.
The ballots are counted later if election officials determine the voters' registrations are valid.
Kerry acknowledged Wednesday in his concession speech that the provisional votes would not be enough for him to win the state, where President Bush had a lead of 136,000 votes.
Mark Weaver, a lawyer for Ohio Republicans, predicted that election officials would throw out most of the ballots after determining the people who cast them were not eligible to vote. However, a spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell said that in the 2000 election, about 107,000 of the 123,518 provisional ballots cast were counted.
Provisional ballots were the focus of an intense legal battle even before Election Day. An appeals court rejected Democrats' request that provisional ballots be counted if they are filed in the right county but the wrong precinct.
