Ohio voting...Messed up again....

From Associated Press via truthout.org :

Ohio Struggles to Fix Voting Problems
The Associated Press
Thursday 04 May 2006

Cleveland - Ohio's first election without punch card ballots was marred by a slew of problems with new voting machines, raising a crucial question: Can the state that decided the last presidential race get it together before November?

Election officials had trouble printing ballot receipts, finding lost votes and tabulating election results in Tuesday's primary. Some election workers were late or did not show up at all in Cleveland's Cuyahoga County, the state's largest. Others could not figure out how to turn on the machines.

"Ohio's quickly getting this reputation as most corrupt and maybe most incompetent," said Chris Link, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, which fielded dozens of complaints from voters.

Tuesday's primary was the first in which all 88 counties used either touch-screen machines or devices that scan ballots marked by voters.

Glitches were reported across the state, and a few local races remained undecided Wednesday while counting continued. The number of outstanding votes was too small to affect races for governor, Congress and statewide offices.

Columbus attorney Cliff Arnebeck, who handles voting-rights cases, said many of the problems were expected. "You could see in the absence of adequate training, people could just screw up," he said.

Cuyahoga County was searching for memory cards holding votes from 74 polling locations. Spokeswoman Jane Platten said the cards might have been left in machines, but she would not discuss details, citing security concerns. The county had reported results from about 93 percent of precincts by midday Wednesday.

Matthew Damschroder, elections chief in Franklin County, encompassing Columbus, defended the training of poll workers but said additional instruction would be offered before November.

"We've had poll workers with the old system who after 10 years still made mistakes," Damschroder said. "It's going to be a learning curve no matter what we do."

The two companies that provided voting machines to Ohio counties said overall the devices worked well, citing only a few memory cards that failed and were quickly replaced.

In North Carolina, the state's election chief also reported a good experience. Gary Bartlett said the machines arrived in February, giving officials two months to test the systems and instruct poll workers. Only minor problems arose in the primary.

"For a first-time rollout, we've got to be pleased," Bartlett said.

The worst problems in Ohio appeared to be in Cuyahoga County, where officials resorted to paper ballots after touch-screen machines failed and about 17,000 absentee ballots were being hand-counted.

David Bear, spokesman for Diebold Inc., which supplied Cuyahoga's machines, said ovals on the ballots printed by the county did not line up properly for optical-scan machines to read them, he said.

Workers in counties using the machines for the second time did far better than first-timers, Bear said. He expects that improvement to increase in November.

Link, of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the problems went far beyond minor snags that could be expected, including complaints that voters were sent away by poll workers who were perplexed by the machines. In those cases, voters should have been offered paper ballots.

"We're not conspiracy theorists unless gross incompetence is a conspiracy, and that's what we saw," she said. "The elected officials charged with ensuring that citizens get to vote are not doing their job."

Workers failed to open one polling place until 1:30 p.m. Robert Bennett, the state GOP chairman and head of the Cuyahoga Elections Board, said they might have been criminally negligent and referred the case to prosecutors.

John Daley of Cuyahoga Falls near Akron said poll workers suggested he leave after some voting machines malfunctioned. He asked for a paper ballot, then the optical-scan system began working.

"I said, 'No, I'm not leaving,"' Daley said. "I kind of got frustrated."
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Associated Press writers Carrie Spencer Ghose in Columbus, Thomas J. Sheeran in Cleveland and Mike Baker in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.

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