By Dan Horn and Sharon Coolidge
Enquirer staff writers

Joe Deters appeared headed back to the prosecutor's office, ending an extraordinary 10 weeks of scandal and turmoil in one of the county's most important offices.

Deters lead his opponent Fanon Rucker, 59 percent to 44 percent, with 97 percent of 1,103 precincts reporting early Wednesday. An official at the Hamilton Board of Elections said as of 6 a.m. Wednesday no additional updates will be available until the official results are released in 10 days. The delay is due to the large number of ballots that need to be reviewed.

The apparent victory means Deters will resign as Ohio's treasurer and return home to a job he held for nearly seven years in the 1990s.

He replaces the incumbent Republican prosecutor, Mike Allen, who withdrew from the race in September after admitting to a 3½ -year affair with a female employee who has sued him for sexual harassment.

Deters, also a Republican, lead Democrat Rucker, a former assistant city prosecutor who had never before run for political office, all day.

Results in the race came more slowly - with officials counting ballots past 4 a.m. -- than in other contests because elections workers were hand counting tens of thousands of write-in ballots.

About 50 percent of the Hamilton County voters who turned out to vote, wrote in a candidate for prosecutor.

Deters, 47, and Rucker, 32, both ran as write-in candidates - a first in Hamilton County politics - because they jumped into the race just six weeks ago after Allen dropped out.

Allen's sudden withdrawal from the race left Democrats and the GOP scrambling to find candidates to run for one of the most politically powerful jobs in the county.

The campaign was short but intense. Both candidates raised more than $100,000 in just a few weeks, and each spent a good chunk of that money on TV ads attacking the other.

Rucker criticized Deters for a campaign finance scandal in the treasurer's office, which resulted in misdemeanor convictions against two Deters' associates. And Deters portrayed Rucker as inexperienced, unqualified and weak on crime.

"We went from seven weeks ago having no financial backing, no campaign staff, no name recognition ... today tens of thousands of people are writing my name in. It's great,'' Rucker said as the election results came in Tuesday night.

After having dinner with family members, Deters went to his Blue Ash home, where he said he would wake up Wednesday to the results.

Earlier in the day, Deters and Rucker crisscrossed the county on a final campaign swing.

They braved rain, chatted with voters and took time out in the early morning to write in their own names at their polling places. Volunteers for each handed out fliers to voters, and Deters' supporters helped pass out some 300,000 pencils bearing his name.

"We had 300,000, but we should have bought 500,000," Deters said after voting. "We're running out of pencils already."

Voters at several polling places reported some confusion over the write-in format, which requires voters to write their candidate's name on the top of the ballot.

Some complained that voters, either intentionally or by accident, had written the candidates' names on the polling stations themselves, or on ballot pages that remain in the stations.

"We've gotten a lot of calls about Joe's name being written in the books," said Rucker, of Roselawn. "And we've also heard that our name was written in the books. People didn't know where to write it in."

Both candidates expected a long, tense night as a few dozen elections officials counted the write-in ballots. About 400,000 people voted in Tuesday's election, and about half of them cast write-in ballots.

"I don't have, nor could I have, the percent of people who are writing in," said John Williams, director of the county's board of elections. "We are going to work until we finish."

Throughout the campaign, both candidates said new leadership was needed to restore integrity to an office sullied by Allen's sex scandal.

But both men would have their work cut out for them should they win the job.

Rucker would have been the first Democrat in decades to take over an office dominated by employees with ties to the GOP. And he would be closer in age to many of the junior prosecutors in the office than to their supervisors.

Deters is still respected in the prosecutor's office, but his reputation took a beating during a 14-month grand jury investigation into his campaign finances. He was not charged with wrongdoing, but one associate admitted to a misdemeanor election-law violation and another pleaded guilty to improper use of public office.

Deters was a popular prosecutor, however, and was such a formidable candidate in the 1990s that Democrats sometimes didn't bother to run anyone against him.

Compared to past prosecutor races, which were dominated by GOP candidates, the short campaign and the unusual, all write-in format stirred excitement among voters from both parties.

Deters still has plenty of supporters in Hamilton County, where the GOP remains the dominant party.

And Rucker, the first African-American to seek the office, rallied support among civil rights activists and African-Americans who have complained for years that the prosecutor's office is too tough on minorities and too easy on police and the wealthy.

Long lines of voters snaked around polling places across the county Tuesday, despite a steady rain.

"I always vote, and I've never seen a line like this," said Judy Menke, who waited early Monday at the Abundant Life Christian Church in North Avondale.

She described herself as a Rucker supporter and said the prosecutor's race was among the most important local races this year.

Craig Hudson, who voted at Deercross Apartments in Blue Ash, said he almost didn't vote for prosecutor in the wake of the Allen scandal, but he settled on Deters because he liked his work as prosecutor in the 1990s.

"I thought about protesting how badly the race was handled by not voting for anyone," Hudson said. "Then I figured it's better to vote for someone good."

E-mail dhorn@enquirer.com and scoolidge@enquirer.com