First all-electronic election marred by problems
Votes not all in on first all-electronic election
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Joan Mazzolini and Grant Segall
Plain Dealer Reporters

Electronic voting in Cuyahoga County began with a thud, with results of most races unknown late Tuesday while an army of election workers prepared to use the most old-fashioned of voting technology - a hand count - to tally thousands of votes.

Glitches with optical scan machines prevented the planned counting of 17,000 absentee ballots. Workers planned to begin hand-counting votes on the ballots at midnight and expected to be at it for hours. And because new touch-screen voting machines did not function properly at first in some polling locations, voters had to fill out paper ballots, which also were to be hand-counted early today.

With the paper ballots accounting for such a substantial percentage of all votes cast Tuesday, the winners in many county races could not be called.

"An investigation will take place over the next couple of weeks" to find out the cause of the problem, said Bob Bennett, chairman of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. "Everyone's vote will be counted . . . but we're not going to get the results in a timely manner."

Even with the problems, board officials said 80 percent of the polling locations opened on time, with no glitches. And, for the most part, voters seemed to like the new voting machines.

Other counties using electronic voting machines for the first time had far fewer problems.

In Summit County, where voting machines had been plagued by malfunctions during tests this spring, live voting was mostly uneventful. All 88 Ohio counties had to use electronic machines Tuesday, but many had debuted them previously.

In Cuyahoga, the technology faltered at various stages of the voting process.

Some poll workers had trouble firing up the machines by the 6:30 a.m. start. Election officials said about 2 percent of the county's 1,434 polling places were without working machines for up to two hours, forcing voters to fill out paper ballots identical to absentee ballots. Some voters left rather than use paper.

In other cases, polling places opened late.

The worst hitch appeared to be at Garden Valley Neighborhood House in Cleveland, which didn't open to voters until 1:30 p.m.

U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones went to court Tuesday afternoon, winning an order keeping the Garden Valley polling place open until 9:30 p.m. to accommodate voters shut out earlier in the day. As a result, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell prohibited election workers statewide from announcing any results before 9:30 p.m. to avoid tainting the vote in the Garden Valley precinct.

But poll workers at Garden Valley inexplicably closed at 8:50 p.m. Board officials ordered them to reopen at 9:15.

Elsewhere, machines were not ready on time at polling places in Cleveland Heights and University Heights. In Parma Heights, voter Chelsea Braden said she was turned away early Tuesday morning in a polling place without working machines.

"I'm inconvenienced having to go back tonight," she said. "I'm more concerned that people aren't going to bother or have time."

A Shaker Heights voter said her vote on the schools' tax measure was confirmed on the screen but not on a printout. Another Shaker resident said she received a ballot without the tax measure. She exchanged it.

When the polls closed, workers at each polling place removed memory cards from the machines to combine votes on a single memory card for the polling place. Then, workers drove the cards to 45 centers set up to transmit vote results to the board offices downtown.

But even that process had glitches.

At the transmission site at Lakewood City Hall, workers had to send results from 23 polling places. It took more than 10 minutes to figure out that the machine they were using kept dialing 9 before the phone number to the election office, preventing the call from going through.

At the transmission site at St. Martin De Porres at East 123rd Street and Superior Avenue, a telephone specially installed to transmit the data was behind a locked door in a closet. Election workers were forced to drive the cards to the election office.

The worst problems of the day appeared to be linked to the machines purchased to count the absentee ballots. They performed so erratically in tests Tuesday morning that election officials decided to hand-count the ballots. Officials did not know whether to blame the ballots, printed by MCR Inc. of Mayfield Heights, or the machines, which are made by Diebold Inc.

Still, most touch-screen voters seemed happy to lose Cuyahoga's old punch-card ballots.

"It was easy, not trying to punch holes, just touching a screen," said Charlene Townsend, after voting at Reserve Square in downtown Cleveland.

People said the touch screens were easy to read. Maybe too easy. Ken Lewis of Strongsville said he could see other voters' choices.

Poll workers said the power cords were too short to position the machines more privately.

Plain Dealer reporters Karen Farkas, Gabriel Baird, V. David Sartin and Tom Ott contributed to this story.
To reach these Plain Dealer reporters:
jmazzolini@plaind.com, 216-999-4563
gsegall@plaind.com, 216-999-4187