Ballots jammed machines, slowed count

By Kevin Osborne    Cincinnati Enquirer    09 November 2005

BATAVIA ? Officials at the Clermont County Board of Elections say ballots that didn?t have proper perforation marks jammed machines and caused the long delay in tallying votes Tuesday that was only completed this morning.

Clermont County was using a new optical scanning voting system for the first time, said board chairman Tim Rudd.

The machines, which were on loan from the manufacturer, replaced an outdated system that was scrapped after the August special election.

Because the perforation mark varied slightly from ballot to ballot, the machines frequently stopped counting them, Rudd said.

That resulted in many ballots having to be fed into the machine two or three times before they were scanned properly.

The situation was further complicated because the ballot was two pages long due to the long list of state issues, and there were write-in candidates in at least seven county races, which had to be counted by hand, he added.

The Board of Elections completed counting votes at 7:44 a.m. today, then sent its workers home and closed its offices for the day.

Clermont County was the second-slowest board in the state Tuesday, behind Lucas County near Toledo