Vote machine decision due by end of month

By Lisa A. Abraham

Beacon Journal staff writer

 

By the end of the month, Summit County will know what kind of voting machines it will get, and by January those machines should be at the Board of Elections.

It was a tie when the board voted in September on whether county voters would use touch-screen voting or pencil-marked paper ballots fed into optical-scan machines.

Democrats voted for the touch screens made by Diebold Election Systems of Green, while Republicans chose optical-scan machines by Election Systems & Software of Nebraska. It's up to Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell to break that tie, which is expected ``very soon,'' according to Blackwell's spokesman Carlo LoParo. ``By the end of November, the tie will be broken on the local voting machines,'' LoParo said.

At a meeting Tuesday, Summit elections board Director Bryan Williams said he had heard that a directive may be coming from Blackwell's office forbidding the use of punch-card ballots after Jan. 1.

LoParo said no such directive is coming. However, he said that the federal Help America Vote Act will take effect in 2006, and it requires that punch-card voting be obsolete by the first federal election of next year.

``Our goal is to ship HAVA-compliant voting machines to all of Ohio's boards of elections no later than January 2006. Some counties will receive new voting machines this December. Others will receive new voting devices in early January,'' LoParo said.

In other action Tuesday, the board approved 1,072 provisional ballots from the Nov. 8 election. The ballots will be included when the county begins its official count, no later than Nov. 23.

The board is to meet on Nov. 29 to certify the official results.

Any automatic recounts for close races, including one Akron School Board seat, will be conducted after that time.