Cuyahoga officials can't explain election delays  (OH)
Joe Guillen    Cleveland Plain Dealer    07 November 2007

Cuyahoga County election officials still don't know what caused computer problems last night that contributed to long-delayed results, and they don't expect a diagnosis for more than a week.

The unofficial final results came in at 11:26 a.m., just four minutes before the Board of Elections held a news conference this morning to recap Tuesday night's countywide election.

Cuyahoga County was among the slowest counties in the state to get final results, said Assistant Secretary of State Chris Nance, who attended Wednesday's news conference.

Elections Director Jane Platten said the computer problems were out of the board's control.

"This is definitely, I believe, a system issue," she said. "We don't know why it occurred at this point."

The computer server, which crashed twice on Tuesday night, is part of the county's electronic voting system. Premier Elections Solutions, a subsidiary if Diebold, makes the equipment.

An explanation for the computer problems will be delayed because Ohio law says the voting equipment must be untouched for 11 days following the election. The investigation can't start until those days have passed, Platten said.

About 99 percent of the county's precincts were counted by 1 a.m. early Wednesday morning. But problems with 13 memory cards held up final unofficial results. Some of the 13 cards were temporarily misplaced, others were unreadable. Votes on unreadable cards were counted using backup memory inside the touch-screen machines.