Articles in today's Cleveland Plain Dealer on election fiasco

[Algorem]

If the election was held Tuesday . . . Why are we still counting?

http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/isele/1146742468308560.xml&coll=2

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Diebold didn't deliver its optical scanning

machines (used to tally absentee ballots) until two weeks ago. Elections workers decided Tuesday morning that they made too many mistakes, and so more than 17,000 absentee

ballots had to be counted by hand -- which was to continue today.


Ballots had printing problems...



People, machines account for glitches in Cuyahoga voting

http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1146731807187630.xml&coll=2

Thursday, May 04, 2006
Joan Mazzolini and Joe Wagner
Plain Dealer Reporters

A day after the polls closed, Cuyahoga County elections officials still couldn't say who won Tuesday's elections.

And they might not know today.

Problems with both types of the county's new electronic voting machines were to blame. Human error added to the crisis, with one in five elections workers failing to report to work Tuesday. And many who did show up struggled with setting up the new machines.

With the touch-screen machines that voters found in their precincts, the problem was with memory cards, the brains of the machines. Elections workers lost cards for about 50 machines. Workers actually lost 70 of the memory cards, they realized Wednesday, but they found 20 of them by evening...

Countdown to chaos

http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/isele/1146742359308560.xml&coll=2

Thursday, May 04, 2006
Tuesday, May 2

2:30 a.m.: Cuyahoga elections chief Michael Vu decides to hand-count 17,000 absentee ballots. Optical-scanning machines that were to be used had failed a series of tests Sunday, Monday and early Tuesday.

6:30 a.m.: Voting begins, but 20 percent of Cuyahoga County's 600 polling places are not ready. Workers are late to open some. At others, new touch-screen machines are not running. Many elections workers are confused about how to set up the machines and how to fix the problems.

9:30 a.m.: At a Jennings Road polling place in Cleveland, a 61-year-old man is arrested and charged with shoving an elections worker and smacking two voting machines, damaging both.

1:30 p.m.: Elections workers finally open the polling place at the Garden Valley Neighborhood House in Cleveland, seven hours late...


What Cuyahoga County elections officials had to say

http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/isele/1146742305308560.xml&coll=2

Thursday, May 04, 2006
Chairman Bob

Bennett, Republican, term expires 2010, paid $21,854 a year, says of Election Day:

"The bottom line is that everyone who wanted to cast a vote yesterday was able to cast a vote, and every vote will be counted."

Edward C. Coaxum Jr., Democrat,

term expires 2010,

paid $21,854 a year:

Coaxum was not available to comment...


Election disaster was not 1st time
Cuyahoga has seen many meltdowns

http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/isele/1146742550308560.xml&coll=2

Thursday, May 04, 2006
Michael O'Malley
Plain Dealer Reporter

Election Day glitches and even meltdowns are nothing new to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

Tuesday's meltdown, which pushed the vote counting into today, was not the first, the second or even the worst in the board's history.

Cuyahoga County will be the last county in the state to count its primary votes, but in 1972 and 1992 presidential primaries, it was the last in the nation.


The mother of all meltdowns occurred in the presidential primary election of 1972, when the nation watched Cuyahoga County drag out the vote count for a week...

Counties' preparations pay off on Election Day

http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/isele/1146742266308560.xml&coll=2

Thursday, May 04, 2006
Grant Segall
Plain Dealer Reporter

Ohio's first all-electronic election had 87 winners - every county but Cuyahoga.

"Overall, it was a very successful deployment," said James Lee, spokesman for the Ohio secretary of state's office, which oversees elections.

Most counties reported scattered snags in Tuesday's primary, but nothing like the mistakes by the lake. Cuyahoga's woes idled some polling places for hours, forced one to stay open late, and delayed the release of results statewide until 9:30 p.m.


Elsewhere, the problems were much fewer and further flung...


Late results keep candidates in suspense

http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/isele/1146742283308560.xml&coll=2

Thursday, May 04, 2006
Tom Breckenridge and Patrick O'Donnell
Plain Dealer Reporters

After months of shaking hands, planting yard signs and droning on about his political views, Mike Foley's first campaign for elected office came down to this: the candidate sitting in his darkened home early Wednesday morning, tapping a computer refresh key, hoping for voting updates that never came.

"I feel tortured," a chuckling Foley said. "The campaign is bad enough. You're on pins and needles. But this is going on and on and on.

"It will be 2014, and they still won't have things counted."

Foley, running in a Democratic primary for the Ohio House, was among scores of candidates, city leaders and school officials existing in an agitated state of limbo, staring at a Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Web site that yielded scant updates as Wednesday wore on...


Editorial-

A touch off the mark
Cuyahoga elections officials have a lot of work to do preparing well-qualified poll workers for November

http://www.cleveland.com/editorials/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1146732022187630.xml&coll=2

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Cuyahoga County's first experience with electronic voting was not the disaster some had feared or that anecdotal reports might have suggested. In fact, most voters seemed to like the touch screens and their paper trails. There appears, at this writing, no reason to think that the new system did not work precisely as it should have at the vast majority of polling sites on Tuesday.

But in our democratic system, even isolated difficulties that discourage voters are cause for concern. And with hundreds of precincts still uncounted half a day after the polls closed, with 17,000 absentee ballots requiring a hand tally because new scanners did not work and with at least one polling site so dysfunctional that a judge had to extend voting hours, it is painfully clear that the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections has a lot to do before November.

First and foremost, the board needs to make sure that it indeed has counted every vote cast Tuesday. Then it needs to figure out why it was impossible to tally the absentee ballots electronically: For now, two vendors are blaming each other. The board also must ask itself why it didn't know until late Sunday that the new counting machines wouldn't work.


Finally, the board and Executive Director Michael Vu need to review what happened at each of the county's 579 polling locations. At first glance, it appears that most of the reported problems were human, not mechanical. Some were simple oversights, like not having the right extension cords. But many more appear to have been either a failure of the board to properly train poll workers, or of those workers to follow instructions...

letters to editor-

Votes of confidence, and distrust, from the polls

http://www.cleveland.com/letters/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1146731607187630.xml&coll=2

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Charles J. Belle, Fairview Park The use of the new voting machines was a farce. In my district (Cleveland Heights, Ward H2), none of the machines was yet working four hours after the polls opened. As I was patiently coloring the dots , poll workers were walking around saying, "I've had enough of this s-t!" And then how secure were our votes? "Just put it in the envelope on the desk there," I was told. Did my vote get counted? Where's the proof? I hope the ACLU goes after Ken Blackwell for perpetrating this voting machine fraud on the people of Ohio. , John Eckendorf
Cleveland Heights
Iwould like to take this op portunity to say how well my voting experience went Tuesday. I vote in Westlake, and we, like many other Ohioans, used the "new" touch-screen electronic voting machines from Diebold. Everyone I spoke with - voters and poll workers - was very happy with the quickness of voting and the ease of following on-screen directions...

[mod mom]

1. "DIEBOLD DIDN'T DELIVER"! Wonder if Blackwell dumped his Diebold stock

before the fiasco. No wonder he became a multi-millionaire while a public servant.

[kster]

2. kick.nt

[knitter4democracy]

3. There's Blackwell for ya.

That should be the meme of the election: he had how many years to get this right and still couldn't?!