April 19, 2006

Trouble feared at ballot box

"Summit County Board of Elections Director Bryan Williams is predicting Election Day failures with the memory cards in the county's new optical scan voting system.

``I don't think we can assume anything else,'' Williams said at a meeting Tuesday, where the elections board reviewed the latest list of troubles.

The voting system uses paper ballots marked in pen by the voter which are fed into a scanner.

And with just two weeks to go before the election, the board continues to experience problems with PCMCIA cards, commonly referred to as memory cards, that are inserted into ballot scanners to record and tabulate those votes.

On Monday, 11 cards that were working properly on Saturday experienced errors or other problems as elections staff have continued practice runs with test ballots, Williams said.

``One card is physically coming apart at the seams,'' Williams said. ``We're seeing at every point of use, a little drop off.''

Williams said that based on what he has seen so far, he can only expect that some of the 475 memory cards programmed for each county voting precinct will not work on Election Day.

The main ballot tabulator, called the election reporting manager or ERM -- which is supposed to read the memory cards and report totals -- also isn't working correctly. At one point in practice runs, the tabulator was dropping off dozens of races for Republican candidates for precinct committee members.

And, the machines the county purchased to accommodate disabled voters still aren't working right, even though by law they should have been available for absentee voting that has been ongoing since the end of March."

The article is here.

Posted by Randy Riddle at April 19, 2006 10:07 AM