Seventeen counties now in lawsuit

Associated Press    24 May 2005

COLUMBUS, Ohio - At least 20 counties have joined a voting-machine maker's lawsuit to extend the state's deadline for qualifying touch-screen systems and the judge in the case has given other counties until Friday to join it.

Joining Election Systems & Software's lawsuit will extend the participating counties' deadline for picking a voting system until June 3.

So far, 42 counties have chosen Diebold Election System's electronic touch screen systems, equipped with a state-required paper record so voters can verify their choices, said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for the state's elections chief, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell.

Three counties will get ES&S optical scan, electronic machines that read marks that voters make on paper, while two will have Diebold optical scan.

ES&S and Blackwell's office have been in negotiations since the company filed the lawsuit on May 2. It asserts that the process by which Diebold won certification was unfair. Blackwell disagrees, saying the same rules applied to all manufacturers. Diebold has the only touch-screen machine to meet certification standards.

Judge Dale Crawford of Franklin County Common Pleas Court has scheduled a hearing for June 3 on ES&S's request to keep Blackwell from enforcing the May 13 deadline for manufacturers to receive certification by the state Board of Voting Machine Examiners and from federal elections officials.

ES&S says it will meet certifications by the end of August at the latest. Blackwell wants systems to be in place for November's municipal elections and says that new systems must be on line by Jan. 1 in case of a special congressional election.

The federal Help America Vote Act requires that new systems be in place for the first federal elections of 2006. Congress passed the act in response to the 2000 election debacle in Florida. The federal government is paying $115 million for the upgrade in Ohio's 88 counties.

The counties now part of the lawsuit are Allen, Auglaize, Brown, Champaign, Delaware, Fayette, Hamilton, Knox, Lake, Logan, Madison, Mahoning, Pickaway, Preble, Putnam, Sandusky, Shelby, Summit, Union and Washington, LoParo said.