One judicial race still too close to call

Dan Hawkins didn’t take the lead in his bid for a seat on the Franklin County Common Pleas bench until 96 percent of the precincts had been counted Tuesday night.

When all the precincts were in, Hawkins was leading Carl Aveni by 2,804 votes out of more than 354,000 ballots cast, according to final, unofficial results.

However, the county Board of Elections has yet to tabulate more than 15,000 provisional ballots and has a 10-day window to accept absentee ballots that were postmarked by Monday.

“It is not over,” Aveni said Wednesday. “It looks like there are a large number of votes that have yet to be counted.”

Hawkins said he wasn’t anywhere close to declaring victory.

“Oh, no,” he said. “We’re going to wait until all the votes are counted.”

For now, Hawkins has a lead of 0.8 percent, just outside of the 0.5 percent margin that triggers an automatic recount, said Aaron Sellers, a Board of Elections spokesman.

Hawkins, a 42-yearold Republican from the Far North Side, is seeking to move from his current position as environmental judge in the Franklin Aveni Hawkins

County Municipal Court to the Common Pleas Court’s general division bench.

Aveni, 49, of Clintonville, is a Democrat who has spent 22 years as a trial lawyer in commercial litigation and is making his first bid for office.

In the six other contested judicial races on the Franklin County ballot, all were won easily by Democrats, making Hawkins’ performance noteworthy. In the most recent judicial performance poll of Columbus Bar Association members, Hawkins finished in a tie as the top- rated of the 15 Municipal Court judges.

He also might have benefited Tuesday by sharing a last name with a Democrat, Monica Hawkins, who collected 65 percent of the vote in winning a newly created Franklin County Domestic Relations/ Juvenile Court judgeship. The two candidates are not related.

The Board of Elections has until Nov. 27 to certify the election results.

If Dan Hawkins prevails, it will be up to the governor to fill the vacancy he leaves on the Municipal Court bench. Which Republican governor will make the appointment is unclear. Hawkins would begin his new job Jan. 7. Mike DeWine was voted governor- elect Tuesday, but doesn’t replace Gov. John Kasich until Jan. 14.

That isn’t the only Franklin County judicial opening that will need to be filled by a governor’s appointment. Common Pleas Judge Laurel Beatty Blunt, a Democrat, ran unopposed Tuesday in winning a seat on the Franklin County Court of Appeals. She will leave the Common Pleas Court for her new job Feb. 9.