Voting system remains untested   (OH)

Joe Guillen    Cleveland Plain Dealer    22 September 2008

Only six weeks from the presidential election, Cuyahoga County can't guarantee its new voting system will work because the machines haven't been fully tested.

That has some people worried, given Cuyahoga's history of election-night calamities and Ohio's status as a crucial swing state in the race between presidential hopefuls Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain.

Full-scale testing cannot begin until the ballot is finalized, which won't happen until petition signatures are verified in Columbus to put a statewide payday-lending issue on the ballot. The county Board of Elections' testing will not finish until late October, mere days before the Nov. 4 election, leaving little time for fixes.

Election officials face the added challenge of introducing the new equipment to poll workers and voters, groups that struggled mightily during a transition to touch-screen voting in 2006.

"I do think Cuyahoga County's new equipment is a real significant concern," said Dan Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University and associate director of Election Law @ Moritz. "You can always expect to have some glitches when you're using new equipment."

The touch screens were scrapped in December, and the county bought paper ballot scanners for $13.4 million from Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb. More than $35 million has been spent on machines since the last presidential election.

The touch screens' debut in May 2006 was a disaster, and voter turnout was much smaller than the expectations for this fall.

Poor testing was cited as a key factor in the debacle. Scanners designed to read absentee ballots weren't tried until the day before the election. The tests showed the scanners could not read absentee ballots, but it was too late to do anything about it. Results were delayed for nearly a week as workers counted absentee ballots by hand.

In the November 2007 election, the server that read memory cards used by the touch screens crashed repeatedly because it couldn't read the cards fast enough. That meltdown is part of the county's lawsuit against Premier Election Solutions, manufacturer of the old machines.

The last of the county's 1,500 new scanners were delivered last week. The board has checked to make sure parts on the scanners work, but testing of their ability to read and count ballots has not begun.

Board of Elections Director Jane Platten said she is more confident in the new server because it is less complicated. The server will undergo Election Day simulation in the coming weeks.

Despite the rapidly approaching election and hundreds of untested scanners, Platten said last week that the county is on track to have the equipment ready.

"We're definitely on schedule, if not a little ahead," she said.

Platten said she expects to start printing ballots by Thursday. After that, elections workers will feed batches of test ballots into the scanners to ensure memory cards are recording votes correctly.

Other large counties in Ohio, including Franklin and Hamilton, also have not started testing. But those counties did not unwrap new equipment.

Matt Damschroder, Franklin County deputy elections director, said he is confident in his county's touch screens because they have performed well.

A fraction of Cuyahoga's new scanners were used in a small election on Aug. 5. Six of the 50 scanners used in that election had paper jams because trays were misplaced inside the boxes that collect scanned ballots. Scanners used in November won't have trays that can cause jams.

The board will get a larger test on Oct. 14, when the 11th Congressional District votes in a primary to fill the remainder of the late Stephanie Tubbs Jones' term.

Although the primary will be a good warm-up for workers and voters, it creates a small time frame to retest the 645 scanners that will be used. Those scanners will have to be retested to make sure they are correctly programmed to read the Nov. 4 ballot.

The board will host a public testing in late October, after the entire slate of in-house tests are finished. But the public test can catch problems, too. A scanner failed at the public test preceding last March's primary, and it was not used in the election.

After enduring multiple problematic elections - not all as director - Platten knows the new equipment's true test will come on Election Day.

"Regardless of the system or the vendor, there's always going to be something that could happen," she said.