A flawed system (voting problems in Ohio)

[GOTV]

Cuyahoga County commissioners hired a team of experts to study electronic voting in the May primary. Their verdict: Worker blunders leave the system so flawed that determining a winner in a close election might be impossible.

More than 75 percent of the time, the votes recorded electronically didn't match the votes recorded on paper.

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1155728013203290.xml&coll=2

[peace13]

1. I don't understand the 'worker blunders' part of this article

Speaking as a poll worker in Ohio, the worker does not have anything to do with the machine tally. The voter can read the paper printout before finalizing the vote, but has no idea how the vote is recorded electronically. My impression is the only way to verify the vote is to match the recorded votes from the machine with a hand count of the paper trail. The machine prints a bar code as well under each individual vote but who knows how that would translate in a recount. I do think a recount could be successfully done manually. Peace, Kim

[seriousstan]

2. What an amazingly uninformative article. Could they have been any

more vague and still have had a subject?

[peace13]

4. I think the point was to blame the poll workers

for a system that has been hijacked from the start! It is so sad. Peace, Kim

[GOTV]

3. More info

This is probably a better article on the same subject from the same paper:

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/115571742986030.xml&coll=2

according to this article:

Nearly 10 percent of Cuyahoga County's official ballots in the May 2 primary were "destroyed, blank, illegible, missing, taped together or otherwise compromised," according to experts who studied the county's new electronic voting system.

I think that's the workers blunder angle.

The article is very poor though.

[peace13]

5. This still makes no sense

If they are talking about official ballots being destroyed, blank, illegible , missing or taped together they would be talking about the backup not the official ballot. The official ballot is electronic which is beyond the poll workers reach. If the tally of official votes does not match the paper backup that is the machines' problem not the poll workers. If the printer was illegible the voter should have complained and a replacement machine brought in.

In the 'good ol' days' we had paper ballots, the voter voted and placed it in the ballot box. At the end of the day the ballots were counted and you better have the same number of voters as voted ballots. If the numbers did not match you were threatened with a visit to the Secretary of States office. Now we have the criminals running the elections and the poll workers being blamed for the problems. Where does the nightmare end? peace, KIm

[EC]

6. I saw this coming...

I wrote a column for my local paper about the voting machines and flaws and guess what? The local Republican head of elections here sent me an invitation to watch the training of poll workers. I declined saying that the strawman of putting the blame on untrained or poorly trained poll workers never even enters the disagreement on the machines...that it is the machines that are the problem of creating non-open or transparent elections and that they would not ease my misgivings by letting me view the training of poll workers....I knew this was going to be their working talking point....

[Algorem]

7. Officials: Fair election in Cleveland area a must

http://www.cleveland.com/newsflash/cleveland/index.ssf?/base/news-26/1155777281163560.xml&storylist=cleveland

8/16/2006, 9:02 p.m. ET
By M.R. KROPKO
The Associated Press

...

If electronic voting can't be made reliable, then paper ballots could be considered, U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones said.

"We have an obligation to the people of Cuyahoga County to assure that there is a fair election in November and we must do whatever it takes to see that occurs," she said.

U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich said voters "have to be concerned" about their votes in Cuyahoga County and about the fact that Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the Republican candidate for governor, is overseeing the November election.

Tubbs Jones and Kucinich, both Cleveland-area Democrats, spoke after a news conference on issues House Democrats intend to pursue leading up to the 2008 presidential election...


Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Only 84 days to go

http://www.cleveland.com/weblogs/openers/

Jennifer Brunner, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state, criticized Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett today, accusing them of failing to address the numerous problems that led to Cuyahoga County's chaotic primary election in May...

Stewart, a member of the House Elections and Ethics Committee, said he would ask committee Chair Jim Hughes, a Republican from Columbus, to hold hearings on the findings in the ESI report...

"What happened is Bob Bennett . . . put together an oversight committee," she said. "Then, once members of the oversight committee had discussions with Ken Blackwell, Blackwell said, 'I'll hold off on my investigation until after the board investigates itself.' I see no movement on the part of Ken Blackwell to do anything further."...

"Jennifer Brunner is crazy," McClelland said. "She is a walking conspiracy theory. She should spend more time thinking about how she would actually run the office as opposed to coming up with wild ideas about Republicans."

[Kurovski]

8. K&R!(nt)