New voting machines cause delayed start in Columbus
By Robert Vitale, The Columbus Dispatch
Tuesday, May 2, 2006

High-tech voting got off to a slow start this morning in dozens of Franklin County precincts as poll workers struggled to produce start-of-the-day printouts from new touch-screen machines.

About 50 people who showed up to cast ballots at 6:30 a.m. left their polling places without voting, county elections officials said. About 20 percent of precincts more than 160 opened as late as 7 a.m., they said.

"All those issues have been resolved," Matthew Damschroder, board of elections director, said at a 10 a.m. news conference in Bexley.

He characterized the problems as "a few basic administrative hiccups, which were to be expected." In past elections, he said, a handful of precints opened late.

"The good news, from our perspective, is we haven't seen any machine malfunctions," Damschroder said.

Voters reported scattered problems with the machines, being used in today's primary election for the first time across Franklin County.

One Republican voter said his vote for U.S. Rep. Deborah Pryce registered on the screen for U.S. Sen. Michael DeWine. Pollworkers shut down the machine because of a calibration problem.

At Beck School on the South Side, two of five machines weren't working this morning. Damschroder said paper tapes became loose during transport so the machines incorrectly indicated they had no paper.

In Westerville and Worthington, some voters said their ballots didn't include school levies. White said poll workers loaded the wrong ballots for those voters.

At late-opening precincts, Damschroder said, poll workers mistakenly thought they couldn't let people vote until they printed out reports from each machine to show they had no votes registered before 6:30 a.m.

That's an extra step the elections board had planned to ease skeptics' fears that voting machines can be manipulated.

Damschroder said 12 representatives from machine manufacturer Election Systems & Software Inc. are in Columbus today.