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Voters love new machines but ...
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
BY Tim Botos    Canton REPOSITORY 
 
CANTON - In some lines of work, you get a chance to fix your mistakes. But when you?re putting on an election, you get one chance to make it right.

Stark County Board of Elections Director Jeff Matthews said his crew missed the mark Tuesday.

?If even one voter is disenfranchised, it may not be a failure, but it is close to it,? he said. ?Our goal is perfection. And in this case, we fell short.?

The debut of 1,400-plus Diebold AccuVote-TSX electronic machines received rave reviews from many voters. However, they confused some poll workers, creating delays in voting and sending some time-strapped voters away without ever casting a ballot.

More problems arose at the end of the night when misaligned absentee ballots and misplaced memory cards delayed the vote count.

Jeanne Gage of North Canton was scheduled for a 12-hour work shift, so she showed up at Clearmont School before the polls were to open at 6:30 a.m. Not only were they late to open, she said, but the voting machine stopped working before it was her turn.

Poll workers were instructed to issue paper ballots in such a situation, but Gage said she wasn?t offered one. Matthews said other voters told similar stories.

?There?s obviously quite a few lessons to be learned,? he said.

WRONG BALLOTS

In at least one instance, Matthews said, a poll worker gave a voter the wrong ballot for that precinct. At polling locations around the county, some voters said the new machines provided less privacy than the punch-card ballots.

But most seemed to love them.

?Oh, they?re nice, real easy to do,? said Linda Hane of Nimishillen Township. ?I used to work at the polls when we counted the votes by hand. It?s a big improvement.?

Mark Radke of Diebold Election Systems, which supplied the $3.9 million worth of voting equipment, said poll workers were simply getting used to a new system. Voters in 41 counties in Ohio used Diebold?s machines for the first time Tuesday.

?Everything was done very accurately,? he said. ?Attention to detail is at a high level. The Board of Elections was more interested in accuracy than speed.?

counting problems

But counting votes went much slower than normal, especially for an off-year election with a turnout of less than 35 percent.

The problem began after polls closed at 7:30 p.m., when 500 to 1,000 absentee ballots could not be counted.

An optical scanner that reads colored-in circles would not read that batch of early votes because a series of dark-colored bars along the printed ballot borders was misaligned. Others could not be read because, for example, voters drew a ring around their choice, instead of coloring in a circle. In all instances, elections employees had to re-make the ballots, creating a new one from scratch.

Typically, absentee results are posted first. However, elections officials decided to post precinct results first.

But the total vote count ran into a second hang-up shortly before midnight, when elections officials realized a handful of precincts were not accounted for.

Computer memory cards that were to be removed from the more than 1,400 voting machines by poll workers were left in the machines. At 1:45 a.m., elections workers still were looking for one of the cards, which meant the vote totals were shy of 100 percent of those cast.



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