COLUMBUS, Ohio – Six men and women are vying for the chance to succeed popular four-term Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman in Tuesday’s primary.
Polls are open from 6:30 a.m. until 7:30 p.m.
The top-two vote getters in the election, regardless of party affiliation, will advance to a November runoff election.
Hear interviews with the candidates.
Four men announced their candidacies after Michael Coleman, a Democrat first elected in 1999, announced late last year he would not seek a fifth term. They are Democrats Andy Ginther, Columbus city council president; James Ragland, a community activist; Zach Scott, the Franklin County sheriff; and Republican Terry Boyd, a Franklin University professor. There are also two write-in candidates: Jeff Brown and Selina Miller.
Two of the candidates – Ginther and Boyd – served on the Columbus City Schools board at a time when district officials were scrubbing student attendance data to improve their performance on state report cards. Questions about the scandal have dogged both Boyd and Ginther throughout the campaign, even though both had left the board before the data-rigging was brought to light.
Ginther has been criticized for learning of the data-scrubbing and failing to report it to the full board, but he says, as chair of the board’s Finance and Accountability Committee, he immediately began an internal investigation after receiving a tip from a whistleblower in 2004.
“There some administrators who wanted to shut it down; I ordered it to continue. They worked with the state Department of Education and other interested parties to try to unravel this. That audit was ongoing until I left the Board of Education (in 2007) and went on to Columbus City Council,” he said.
The Columbus Dispatch, which first reported on the data-scrubbing practice in 2012, says the audit was stopped before Ginther left the board.
Boyd served on the board until 2009 and was its president from 2006 until his departure, mostly avoiding the fallout from the scandal because it was revealed after he left.
He still had to address the fact that the practice was going on while he was a board member and he laid the blame at Ginther’s feet.
“Mr. Ginther decided to handle it in whatever way he decided to handle it but did not bring it to the full board, did not bring it to the president of the board for enlightenment and discussion,” he said. “That board…would have done the appropriate thing and stopped (the data-scrubbing) in its tracks.”
The district’s data chief and then-Superintendent Gene Harris were convicted for their roles in the scandal. According to a report in the Dispatch, the state auditor said that the data-rigging could have been uncovered years earlier if the district had actively investigated the 2004 tip.