COLUMBUS —“Just add Pepper,” goes the campaign slogan for the Ohio attorney general candidate. Sometimes three more words are added at events, “Dump da’ wine.”

David Pepper, a former Hamilton County commissioner and Cincinnati councilman, is taking on Republican incumbent Mike DeWine on Nov. 4 in what has become one of the more contentious statewide contests.

The Democrat argues that the system Mr. DeWine uses to award lucrative special counsel contracts is “clearly and deeply corrupted” and in TV ads directly links contributions to Mr. DeWine’s campaign to the former U.S. senator’s personal bank account.

“The stories on his pay-to-play way precede me entering this race,” Mr. Pepper said. “I was at conferences of lawyers two years ago or before in other states where lawyers would tell me doing work for the attorney general of Ohio meant they had to pay $1,000 to his campaign.”

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The picture was complicated by the fact that Mr. DeWine lent his own campaign $2 million of his own money in 2010 when he defeated incumbent Democratic Attorney General Richard Cordray.

“All of this, combined with the fact that he used $1.7 million to pay himself back, makes this uniquely problematic,” Mr. Pepper said. “It’s especially problematic given that this is the office people expect to crack down on pay-to-play.”

In particular, he points to a collections contract awarded to a newly created firm without collections experience whose principals sent checks of $4,000 each on the day the contract was awarded.

“If this is OK, and the attorney general says that this is OK, welcome to a very corrupt Ohio,” Mr. Pepper said. “This is not an appearance problem. This is standard operating procedure for this office.”

Allegations that campaign contributors get favorable treatment when it comes to special counsel contracts have been made against prior attorneys general and have become virtually a perennial campaign issue.

Mr. DeWine insisted nothing improper occurred, although he conceded his office needed a paper trail to demonstrate that.

“Those interviews and decisions are made a number of levels below me,” Mr. DeWine said. “We did hear the criticism about not having a paper trail. We have now created a paper trail. That paper trail reflects in the criteria that we’ve always used and, I suspect, that every attorney general has used.”

Mr. Pepper has proposed a scoring system to evaluate bidders as well as a blackout period at contract-award times when bidders would be prohibited from making contributions.

He has been critical of decisions by Mr. DeWine to fight federal court rulings affecting such things as voting rights and gay marriage and his decisions to voluntarily get involved in cases in other states where Ohio isn’t a party, such as in challenges to the federal Affordable Care Act contraception mandate.

“I think he’s being driven far more by his personal politics,” he said.

Mr. Pepper agreed that, as the state’s lawyer, the attorney general is obligated to defend it and its laws but said it isn’t that black and white.

“The client isn’t allowed to violate the constitution,” he said. “If you believe the law or the lawmakers are violating the constitution, you don’t simply blindly defend it. You say something.”

First Published October 26, 2014, 4:00 a.m.