Ohio County To Replace Voting Machines

Less Than 3 Months Before Primary, Election Official Says Touch-Screen Machines Must Go

(CBS/AP)  Ohio's chief elections officer decided Friday to have the state's most populous county switch to a new voting system in time for the March 4 presidential primary.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner broke a 2-2 tie for the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, which deadlocked a day earlier on the issue.

She had been pressuring the board to scrap its $21 million electronic touch-screen machines for an optical-scan system, in which a computer scans ballots that voters fill out by hand. She issued a report last week citing security flaws with the current system.

"I find that the move to a high-speed central count optical-scan system for paper ballots for the March 2008 primary election is the best way to ensure a safe, reliable and trustworthy primary election," Brunner said in a letter to the director of the Cuyahoga board.

The county will lease equipment from Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems & Software for about $1 million. That includes high-speed scanners to tally primary votes downtown at the board of elections.

"The question is no longer can we do this," said Jane Platten, the board's director. "The situation is we must do this and we must do it right."

One of the major jobs will be retraining poll workers.

Platten believes it won't be a difficult transition because this system will be more simple to use.

"They don't have the electronic devices to set up, it's more of a paper management system now," she said. "They're already used to using the optical scan ballots at the precinct. They use them for provisional voting and curbside voting if someone can't get out of their car."

Many voting problems were reported in Ohio in the 2004 race between President Bush, a Republican, and Democrat John Kerry, including the accuracy of vote totals in precincts using electronic machines. There were also complaints that larger counties like Cuyahoga did not have enough working machines to accommodate all voters, leading to hours-long lines at some precincts.

Kerry conceded the election after narrowly losing Ohio's 20 electoral votes.

CBS Affiliate WOIO reports that the consulting firm of ES&S lobbyist Tom Hays wrote a report criticizing the current electronic system.

The report damaged the commissioner's confidence, and gave a boost to his client's optical scan system.

ES&S was awarded the no-bid contract.

"Well, I think the only one who won yesterday was Tom Hays, the consultant for ES&S," Tom Coyne, a former election board chairman, told WOIO. "The voters are certainly not getting a superior system."

Cuyahoga County taxpayers will now have to eat $21 million spent on now-useless electronic voting equipment, and spend another $9 million to buy and maintain the new system.

Election workers now have less than 74 days to get rid of 6,000 pieces of voting equipment, obtain new equipment, and get trained before the primary.

[remmeler]

The problem with electronic voting is not the electronics. It is the lack of a paper trail. If the system recorded the vote on a paper spool and gave the voter a printed receipt which he would then deposit in a box on the way out, it would give enough information to perform an audit of the machine and the election process, if necessary. It is almost criminal that the voting machine companies tried to cut features and that the counties bought something that didn''t have the audit features that experts were talking about at that time.

[homespunlady]

hmm.. seems to me they''ll be saving money in the long run (9 million versus 21 million) AND VOTE ACCOUNTABILITY. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections have my respect.

Agreeing to NOT have a paper trail is like trusting the Mafia or the local drug dealer(s) to run your storefront business for you and NOT do anything illegal or immoral with it.

NOT too BRIGHT and downright risky.

Too bad there aren''t even MORE BRAVE SOULS like them.

[rowdytexan2]

Colored beans in a glass jar would be better than computerized voting machines...geezus

Or, maybe we could just run voters like cattle into separate pens, count ''em, then take a picture to record it then time and location stamp it, lol Then stamp all those that already voted with invisible scannable unwashable (for 24 hours) ink on the foreheads and have a reading light at shute door where an alarm goes off it reads some ''already voted'' ink. The whole process shouldn''t take more than 5 minutes each.

Of course, then we''d have to not develop the formula for the ink until the day before so the republicans couldn''t get their hands on it and develop a quick wash for it.

...sigh...

[prinzowhales]

Hundreds of chips to California voting machines have been ''lost'' in transit by either UPS or Fed Ex...now they will all have to be checked again...30 million could have been saved if they had just not bought the voting machines. The theft of the election in Ohio was even more flagrant than the 2000 theft of Florida.

[p-syrus]

Two words: Open Source.

ANY public contract for electronic voting machines should REQUIRE as a term of the sale that ALL software on the machine be OPEN SOURCE. to allow for public auditing of the software & it''s associated problems.

This will facilitate the open public audit of software and allow problems in software implementation to be OPENLY acknowledged and SOLUTIONS FOUND.

Nothing creates public confidence in software like OPEN SOURCE. Nothing results in RELIABLE software like OPEN SOURCE.

If the manufacturer''s balk at providing an OPEN SOURCE solution then NO SALE.

Nothing in a free market system prevents customers, even including public agencies, from DEMANDING OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS.

The only thing superior to the OPEN SOURCE software paradigm is Pree Software which promotes licensing to extends OPEN SOURCE software benefits to include the fundamental freedoms of use, distribution & right to modify software as an user may require.

Proprietary software is just the software equivalent of "lemons".

[realpatriot1]

The Rove machine just got their *** handed to them on a plate!

Not only will Diebold not be able to steal the votes electronically but there won''t be any hanging chads on the paper ballots and when the Republican lawyers attempt to challenge the votes there will be an optical paper trail.

By the way, Cuyahoga County is the 8th most populous county in the country and is the most highly Democratic County in the country by an astronomical margin; even most of the wealthy suburbs of Cleveland are majority Democratic.

This is the worst news possible for the Republican machine!

[tbweb]

Ohio should share this with Florida! Is the U.S. ready for "Hanging Chads" Part II?

[liberalme]

Isn''t is just a shame we are reduced to having to put security in place just to vote?

How can anyone not see just what the Bush mafia has done to our country!

These people need the most harsh punishment imposed on them, from Bush right down to those who refuse to impeach the whole tribe!
I certainly hope we all do the right thing in 2008, we really need to clean up the government from Pelosi on down--it''s up to us, and if any "questionable" voting machines show up, this country will be heard loud and clear--we''re sick of it!

[hillary4sout]

YEAH~! MOVEN EM NOW! HILLARY WANTS TO WIN THE RIGHT WAY AND THAY WONT MESS WIT HER LIKE GORE SHE WILL GIVEN REAL HILL............ GO HILLARY 08 KICKIN A** in o8 ..

[neobrian-2009]

No MORE Bush Bots!
Fair Elections Must Return,...IF The USA is Going To Return To the People!!!!The World has seen what has happened ,..Rampant Corruption has been " THE RULE " instead of ''The Exception''...
Blatant Bush has colluded with big oil,..crooked companies such as Halliburton have raped our treasury,..Blackwatergate,..Fired Prosecutors who dared to look into their Mis-deeds,.Tried to give our ports away,.Tried to put his personal Lackey attorney on the Supreme court,..Lied Daily,...Put us in a war with lies about WMD,...Wants to go to war with Iran over More Lies,..Covers Up Each Scandal with " Executive Privilege to lie'',..Tortures with the same technique that we prosecute against,..COME ON PEOPLE,.ENOUGH IS ENOUGH !!
The EVIL Roots of this SHRUB run Deep,...He has Poisoned US long Enough ! STOP The MADNESS !!!
NO MORE GOP !! NO MORE GOP !! NO MORE GOP !!
Friends NEVER let friends vote republiCON !