Delayed vote counting in Seneca, Putnam counties completed
JENNIFER FEEHAN   Toledo Blade   07 November 2007

The outcome of the 5th Congressional District Republican primary was in doubt this morning as Seneca and Putnam counties struggled to get their votes counted.

Putnam County, which kept polls open until 9 p.m. yesterday because of equipment problems, finally reported its results about 6 a.m. today for the race dominated by State Rep. Bob Latta (R., Bowling Green) and State Sen. Steve Buehrer (R., Delta).

And it was 2 a.m. before workers at the Seneca County Board of Elections in Tiffin finished scanning ballots cast for the 5th Congressional District primary race.

Putnam County Elections Deputy Director Carla Tooman said officials still are not sure what went wrong with the electronic voting machines programmed for the congressional primary. Putnam County had borrowed 140 machines from Franklin County after most of its own voting machines were damaged in the August flood that hit Ottawa.

“Some of them worked. Some of them didn’t. We can’t figure it out,” she said. “It’s the million dollar question.”

Ms. Tooman said all of the machines were tested three times before they were sent out to the polling places and all were working fine. The county did not have problems with the machines used for general election voting, but had to have voters cast paper ballots for the congressional primary.

In Seneca County, Elections Director Janet Leahy said the county’s optical scan voting system could only be programmed for one election — in this case the general election — which meant those ballots were scanned by voters after they filled them out at each precinct, while the primary ballots had to be brought back to the elections office after the polls closed to be fed into the scanner one by one and counted.

“The general election was not the problem,” Ms. Leahy said. “It was just that two elections are going to take a little longer especially when you don’t have the equipment.”

Ms. Leahy said the county could not afford to purchase additional scanners, which cost $5,000 each, for what was likely to be a one-time event. The unusual, dual general-primary election was scheduled following the death of U.S. Rep. Paul Gillmor (R., Tiffin) in September.

Local general election results were tallied by about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Among those results, Tiffin City Councilman James Boroff was elected mayor to replace longtime Tiffin Mayor Bernard Hohman who was not seeking a fourth term.

Seneca County voters approved two countywide tax levies on the ballot: a five-year, 0.3-mill renewal for senior citizens services and a five-year, 0.5-mill renewal for the county’s board of mental retardation and developmental disabilities, which runs the Seneca County Opportunity Center.

A new five-year, 0.8-mill levy to support the tri-county Mental Health and Recovery Services Board was narrowly defeated in Seneca County, although it passed in Sandusky and Wyandot counties by a wide enough margin to win approval.

General election results in Putnam County were available last night, although the mayor’s race in Columbus Grove remained in doubt today because of an extraordinary number of write-in votes cast in the race. Those have not yet been sorted because of more pressing priorities, elections officials said.

Two candidates’ names appeared on the ballot, while two others were seeking the mayor’s job as write-in candidates, including former Mayor Michael Bogart who is in jail serving a seven-month sentence stemming from a drunken driving conviction.