Edison still wins contest after boxes of uncounted ballots discovered

MILAN

After finding boxes of ballots that they forgot to count, embarrassed officials in the Ohio Historical Society say they've had to revise the vote count in the statewide poll choosing a new statue to represent Ohio in Washington, D.C.

But don't worry, Milan residents -- Thomas Edison still won.

The revised figures show that Edison won 14,261 votes, a 998-vote margin over the Wright Brothers, who came in second at 13,363. Jesse Owens, the famous Olympic athlete, moved into third after the additional votes came in.

The boxes were discovered after vote totals had been announced Wednesday morning.

"It was an oversight," said Kim Schuette, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Historical Society. "We don't have a lot of office space here. Somebody put some boxes in an empty office room and forgot about it."

After discovering the boxes, historical society employees did a room-by-room search to see if any more would turn up.

"We are pretty sure there are no more boxes," she said.

The historical society has pledged to bring in a third party to check the vote totals and make sure they are correct, she said.

Meanwhile, there are signs that not everyone in Dayton, the hometown of the Wright brothers, has decided to be a gracious loser.

The Dayton Daily News ran an editorial Thursday, arguing that Edison left Ohio at age 7 and that the Wrights remain a better choice.

Reader comments at the newspaper's Web site offered similar views.

One wrote, "First North Carolina steals the Wright brothers for the state quarter, then we get stuck with a statue of a man who did his important work in New Jersey. What next? the U. of M. selling Woody Hayes T-shirts?"