COLUMBUS — President Bush and Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry were tied in a newspaper’s poll of Ohio voters published yesterday.

The challenger led by just eight responses out of 2,880 surveys returned in the mail poll by The Columbus Dispatch, which showed 50 percent favoring Kerry and the Republican president.The poll was conducted Oct. 20 through Friday. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points, although sampling error is not the only source of error in any poll.

The response rate was 25 percent.