Touch screens' electoral debut in Medina not without glitches
Friday, November 11, 2005
Terry Oblander    Cleveland Plain Dealer

Medina- The first-time use of touch-screen voting machines taught elections workers some hard lessons Tuesday night.

Medina County Elections Director Sue Strasser said poll workers failed to deliver computer memory cards for six voting machines to the main office. But even without the complete vote counts, returns were being reported as final results.

The workers, some armed with flashlights, were forced to go back into dark polling places to retrieve the missing cards.  

The incomplete results could be reported as complete because the computer program that made that determination was based on polling places, not on the number of precincts.

David Baer, a spokesman for Diebold Elections Systems, maker of the touch-screen machines, said that they can report results in a number of ways and that first-time users of the systems - such as Medina County - often find they need to tweak the reporting programs to get the kinds of reports they need.

The final voting numbers reported Wednesday by the board did not change the outcomes of any elections. Winners remained winners, and issues that passed or failed stayed that way.