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Melanie Leneghan might challenge results of Ohio 12th Congressional District GOP primary | Cleveland.com
May 21, 2018
By Jeremy Pelzer
https://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2018/05/melanie_leneghan_might_challen.html
Republican Melanie Leneghan says she may seek a vote recount or contest the results of rival Troy Balderson’s 12th Congressional District narrow primary win earlier this month.
Leneghan lost the May 8 primary to Balderson by 653 votes – less than 1 percent of the votes cast, according to unofficial totals. She told Capitol Letter, cleveland.com’s daily Statehouse newsletter, on Monday that while she hasn’t heard of any fraud or problems with the election, she was “surprised” that Balderson won his home county of Muskingum County by nearly 68 percentage points, or about 3,500 votes.
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Leneghan, a Liberty Township trustee in Delaware County, said calling for a recount or contesting the election is “not a sour grapes thing,” but rather would be done “out of respect for the voters, to make sure that their votes were counted and counted properly.”
One reason she’s considering taking action, she said, is because she said Balderson’s campaign made a robocall the weekend before the primary featuring a woman calling herself “Melanie from Delaware County” who urged listeners to vote for Balderson.
Such actions, she said, show that Balderson is capable of “anything.”
Phone calls to the Balderson campaign were not immediately returned Monday afternoon.
Balderson and Leneghan were the top two vote-getters in a crowded nine-way Republican primary to succeed Republican Pat Tiberi, who stepped down in January. The contest was seen as a proxy war between Tiberi and other establishment Republicans (who backed Balderson) and Freedom Caucus members such as U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (who supported Leneghan).
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