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05-23-2007, 08:36 PM
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WV Table Games -- One county back to square-one
http://www.wvgazettemail.com/section/News/2007051759
A referendum on table gaming in Kanawha County will be pushed back to Aug. 11, Kanawha County commissioners decided on Thursday. The vote, originally scheduled for June 9, had to be put off after county election officials missed a deadline for a legal advertisement. Commissioners held an emergency meeting at noon Thursday to decide what to do about the election. Commissioners Kent Carper, Dave Hardy and Hoppy Shores could have simply postponed the election, or cancelled the flawed election and started over. - advertisement - Ben Beakes, chief of staff for Secretary of State Betty Ireland, said state law doesn’t specify what do to when a deadline is missed, but cautioned just postponing the election could open the vote to a legal challenge. “I’m going to move that we go back to square one,” Hardy said. “To me, when you have this kind of mistake, rather than go off into some gray area, it’s better to just fix it right the first time.” Beakes said there was a substantial legal difference between just postponing the election and starting over. To start over, he said, county commissioners would have to cancel the currently scheduled election and begin the entire election process again. Erring on the side of caution, as Carper put it, the commission voted to do just that. Dan Adkins, vice president of the company that owns Tri-State Racetrack & Gaming Center in Nitro, presented commissioners with a petition to hold a whole new election. Under state law, the commission then has 90 days to hold the vote. In order to meet all legal requirements by starting over, the earliest the election could practically be held is Aug. 11, County Clerk Vera McCormick said. The first deadline is notifying members of the Democratic and Republican executive committees, who must be told about the election 84 days from the vote in order to start rounding up poll workers. Earlier this year, legislators passed a law allowing voters in Kanawha, Hancock, Ohio and Jefferson counties to decide whether to allow casino-style table gaming at their county racetracks. Under the new law, once asked by racetrack owners to put the issue on the ballot, county officials had no choice but to schedule an election. Officials in Ohio and Jefferson counties decided to hold their elections on June 9. Hancock and Kanawha county officials wanted to have their votes on the same day, but both missed advertising deadlines and had to push the referendum back. Hancock County officials decided to move their election to June 30. More than a dozen gambling opponents attended Thursday’s emergency meeting in Kanawha County. Norman Cannada, pastor of the West Charleston Baptist Church, asked the commission if they could at least have the table gaming vote on a weekday, so more people could vote. Aug. 11 is a Saturday. Cannada said elections are only scheduled on Saturday in hopes that fewer opponents will turn out to vote. “Let’s have a fair referendum,” he urged. - advertisement - Hardy agreed that weekday elections tend to have higher voter turnouts, but also said early voting at the county courthouse is open for 20 days before the election. Voters who will be out of town on Aug. 11 can also cast absentee ballots. Moving the election to a weekday would create more problems than it would solve, Hardy said. Kevin McCoy, president of the conservative West Virginia Family Foundation, was also at Thursday’s meeting. The Family Foundation has filed a lawsuit challenging the Legislature’s approval of table games on constitutional grounds. If a vote is inevitable, McCoy said, he doesn’t have a problem with the Aug. 11 date. As a side-note... http://www.dailymail.com/story/News/...n-table-games/ Nearly 1,000 Ohio and Jefferson county voters have already cast ballots on whether to allow casino table games at their local racetrack, county officials said. Early voting began Friday, before the June 9 special elections in those counties. Ohio County recorded 544 votes while Jefferson County counted 397, with all but 150 cast on Monday. [...] 
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