Tonight, every county board of elections in Ohio will have one Republican director and one Democratic deputy director supervising the counting of votes to ensure that it is done fairly.

Every county, that is, except Clermont - where there will be a Republican director but no Democrat deputy. That's because of a dispute between the Republicans and Democrats on the county Board of Elections.

The latest flap comes after three elections in which Clermont County has been plagued by delays in counting votes. Last summer, during a special congressional primary, election officials said humidity and damp ballots produced a late vote count that pushed Clermont County Republican Jean Schmidt over Democrat Paul Hackett.

"We've had problems here, and this is just going to make the perception worse that there's something not right about election counts in Clermont," said elections board chairman Dave Lane, who is also county Democratic Party chairman.

Twice in the last two months, when Lane and his fellow Democratic board member, Paul Campbell, proposed that deputy director Kathy Jones be rehired, the two Republicans on the board - county GOP chairman Tim Rudd and Rick Combs - voted against it.

The Republicans' refusal to approve Jones came after the Democrats had agreed to the GOP choice for director, Michael Keeley, a former Indian Hill police administrator and Goshen Township trustee.

In all counties, the director of the board of elections is of the same party as the Ohio secretary of state, and the opposition party is allowed to hire its own deputy director to help oversee day-to-day operations at the board.

But in votes on March 6 and April 18, the Clermont board voted along party lines and the issue was sent to Secretary of State Ken Blackwell's office, who, under Ohio law, decides tie votes by local boards.

Blackwell routinely delegates such decisions to his assistant secretary, Monty Lobb, who wrote a letter to Keeley last week in which he broke the tie vote in favor of the Republicans and instructed the board to submit the name of another candidate for the job of deputy director.

Rudd said he would not discuss the reasons the Republicans had for rejecting Jones, calling it a "personnel matter."

While he acknowledged that it is unusual for board members of one party to reject the choice of the other party for a director or deputy director's job, "it does happen from time to time.''

"The Democratic Party is filled with a lot of good people. They ought to find one of them, put his or her name forward and we'll consider their choice," said Rudd, a supporter of Schmidt over Republican Bob McEwen in today's GOP primary.

Brian Rothenberg, communications director for the Ohio Democratic Party, said the party is looking at taking legal action to force the Republicans on the board to accept their Democratic colleagues' choice.

"We're not going to fold on this,'' said Lane. "It would take a lot more than what I have seen so far for me to be convinced that somebody is up to no good at the Board of Elections, but this kind of thing just adds to the perception."

E-mail hwilkinson@enquirer.com

Vote-counting problems in Clermont County

Each county in Ohio has a four-member board of elections that presides over election matters - including handling complaints, certifying election results, certifying candidates for the ballot, selecting voting machines, hiring election workers.

Each county political party - Democrat and Republican - appoints two members to the board.

The chairman of the board is a member who is of the opposite political party from the Ohio secretary of state.

The director, who runs the day-to-day operations of the board, is always of the same political party as the Ohio secretary of state.

The deputy director is a member of the other political party. County boards can do away with the deputy director's position, but only with at least three votes from the board members.

Tie votes in the board of elections are decided by the secretary of state.