Officials confident of new touch screen
Absentee problems believed fixed

By IGNAZIO MESSINA     Toledo BLADE    08 November 2005 

Lucas County Board of Elections officials know today's use of touch screens for the first time will be difficult for some voters, but they are confident the new machines and the poll workers are ready.

 

"I don't anticipate a lot of problems," said Jill Kelly, director of the county's elections board. "We did a lot of outreach to make people feel comfortable with the new machines."

Ms. Kelly spent much of yesterday meeting with poll workers and rovers - who travel to different polling locations on Election Day - to discuss potential problems they could encounter with the new Diebold electronic voting machines.

Poll workers have been trained to make sure none of the machines have been tampered with before Election Day. The elections board has extra machines to take to polling locations should the need arise, she said.

"We are doing everything we can possibly do to ensure our voters this is a safe machine," Ms. Kelly said.

At least two machines will be at each location.

Officials of the elections board said yesterday they believe a problem discovered with absentee ballots has been rectified.

Hundreds of voters still had not been sent the absentee ballots as of early last week.

The printer of the ballots, Dayton Legal Blank, sent the ballots too late, and some arrived riddled with mistakes. Several hundred ballots included duplicates of the state issues, but no local ballots.

Other did not appropriately denote that they were "split" ballots. For example, voters within the city of Toledo who vote in school districts other than Toledo Public Schools are supposed to vote on a "split" ballot.

Faulty ballots were sent to 144 people before elections officials noticed the problem. Hundreds of others had to be reordered.

"We hand-delivered the accurate ballots to those people or we overnighted them," Ms. Kelly said.

If a voter filled out an application for an absentee ballot but did not receive one, he or she must go to the board of elections and fill out an affidavit swearing not to vote at another location. The voter then would be permitted to fill out an absentee ballot at the office at Government Center in downtown Toledo.

The board of elections has received more than 15,000 absentee ballots.

In the region, Wood, Fulton, Henry, and Defiance counties are also using new electronic voting equipment for today's election. Erie, Ottawa, and Sandusky counties are using optical-scan machines. Seneca and Williams counties are using a punch-card system.

In Michigan, the majority of voters in Monroe and Lenawee counties will cast their ballots with optical-scan machines, although voters in the city of Tecumseh will use touch-screen electronic voting machines.