INVALID SIGNATURES OUTNUMBER VALID ONES

Nearly two out of every three of the 60,801 signatures gathered in Lucas
County by a group working to make Ohio's drug laws more lenient were
determined by the county board of elections to be invalid, elections
Director Joe Kidd said yesterday.

Overall, 20,236 signatures were found to be valid, while 24,184 were found
to be invalid, Mr. Kidd said last night. Another 16,381 signatures were
questionable and so were not counted, he said.

The petitions will be returned to Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell's
office today, where he will examine the work of county elections boards
statewide and determine whether the issue will be certified for the Nov. 5
ballot by the middle of next week, said Blackwell spokesman Carlo LoParo.

If certified, the measure will ask voters to amend the state constitution
to allow some first and second-time drug offenders to be diverted to
treatment programs instead of to court and possibly jail.

The measure is sponsored by the Ohio chapter of the National Campaign for
New Drug Policies. The national campaign office in Santa Monica, Calif., is
promoting similar measures in other states this fall, including Michigan,
Florida, and Washington.

While a large percentage of the petition signatures gathered in Lucas
County appear to be invalid, an informal tally by the secretary of state's
office shows the measure will probably qualify for the ballot.

With Lucas County and 57 others reporting yesterday afternoon to the
secretary of state, 165,224 valid signatures and 124,109 invalid signatures
had been counted. Election boards in some large Ohio counties - including
Summit, Cuyahoga, Montgomery, and Hamilton - had not submitted their data
to Mr. Blackwell's office as of the close of business yesterday.

To qualify a constitutional amendment for the state ballot, petitioners
must meet two requirements:

They must submit valid signatures totaling at least 10 percent of the
number of people who voted in the last gubernatorial election. In this
case, 335,422 signatures from registered voters are required.

In their submission to the secretary of state, petitioners also must
include signatures of registered voters totaling at least 5 percent of the
number of people who voted in the last gubernatorial election from each of
at least 44 counties.

In Lucas County, 132,560 people voted for governor in 1998, so 6,628 valid
signatures from voters in the county are required on the petitions now
under scrutiny.

Petitioners met the requirement easily in Lucas County and in 35 other
counties as of the end of business yesterday, Mr. LoParo said. The state
had yet to receive data from 30 other counties late yesterday, he said.

The Lucas County elections board has been reeling from the local
signature-gathering campaign, as Progressive Campaigns Inc., the private
company hired to gather signatures from voters here, submitted what
elections officials said were thousands of "questionable and perhaps
fraudulent" voter registration forms to the elections office as part of its
petition drive. Election workers have been bogged down for weeks in a
tedious process sorting valid voter registrations and petition signatures
from the thousands of invalid submissions to the county.

Mr. Kidd said they've set aside hundreds of petitions he suspects contain
fraudulent signatures.

They will be referred to the county prosecutor for investigation and
possible criminal prosecution.

"It's a mess. It's hard enough for any elections office to process 60,000
signatures in a short period of time," he said. "Our problem is compounded
by the fact that we have 15,000 voter registration cards that are
questionable, ... combined with questionable and problematic petitions."