Errors plague voting process in Ohio, Pa.

Nov 3, 2004

Mahoning and Mercer — the only counties in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys to use electronic voting machines and among only a handful in Ohio and Pennsylvania with the technology — encountered a series of problems that delayed results for hours Tuesday.

The Mahoning County Board of Elections will begin an investigation immediately to find out the sources of the problems, said Mark Munroe, the agency's chairman.

Problems in 16 of the county's 312 precincts caused the results in Mahoning to be held up for about three hours as election employees checked the machines' tallies at the election board. The results are supposed to be tabulated at the precinct locations. The results were finalized about 1:30 a.m. today. The county has 1,162 electronic voting machines.

[...] The problems were a combination of human and computer errors, Munroe said.

"We've never seen anything like this before," he said.

[...] Some of the machines malfunctioned, others had problems with the personal electronic ballot cartridge placed into the machines before each vote to count the ballots, and other problems were caused by human error, Munroe said.

The human error specifically was precinct officials getting nervous or overwhelmed by the number of people voting, and then failing to properly follow protocol to count the ballots in the machine, he said.

That led to some races showing votes of negative 25 million, Munroe said.

"The numbers were nonsensical so we knew there were problems," he said.

There were similar problems at four or five other Mahoning precincts, but poll officials there were alert enough to catch the problems, and fix them, said Thomas McCabe, deputy elections director.

[...] There were other problems with Mahoning machines. One in Boardman Precinct 44 had to be removed because the glass on top of the electronic screen was too far from the screen, making it difficult for people to use their fingers to cast ballots, Munroe said. A screen went blank on a Youngstown voter while he cast his ballot, he said.

Also, there were 20 to 30 machines that needed to be recalibrated during the voting process because some votes for a candidate were being counted for that candidate's opponent, Munroe said.

[...] About a dozen machines needed to be reset because they essentially froze.

Also, about 300 paper absentee ballots were damaged while being opened in Mahoning, McCabe said. The county used smaller envelopes than usual, and damaged 300 absentee ballots, but didn't destroy them. A Democrat and a Republican remarked the damaged ballots, he said.

[...] Mercer County's director of elections said it was a computer software glitch that caused touch-screen voting machines to malfunction in about a dozen precincts Tuesday. The election board didn't finish counting ballots in Mercer until about 3:30 a.m. today. Election workers in Mercer County raced to take paper ballots to polling places in the Shenango Valley after a series of computer errors.

"I don't know what happened," said James Bennington, who had been assured Friday that all 250 of the county's touch-screen units had been checked and rechecked. The county has 100 voting precincts.

Keith Jenkins, director of the county's computer department, agreed that it was a software malfunction and said repeated calls to UniLect Corp., the company that sold the machines to the county in 2001, failed to resolve the problem.

[...] Precincts in Hermitage, Farrell, Wheatland, West Middlesex, Shenango Township and Sharon experienced the most serious machine difficulties, some from the moment the polls opened at 7 a.m. Some machines never operated, some offered only black screens and some required voters to vote backwards, starting on the last page of the touch-screen system and working back to the front page.

[...] Some of those systems never came back on line, leaving poll workers to resort to handing out paper ballots for people to cast their votes. The county had about 2,000 paper ballots prepared in advance for emergencies, but the problem was so great that "a couple thousand more" were printed and hauled out to the precincts as they ran low or ran out of ballots.

[...] Forgery in Trumbull

In Trumbull County, a voter in Warren Township precinct D arrived at the polls to discover that someone had already voted in her name. The person who used her name apparently forged her signature and wrote that she lived at a different address, said Josh Garris, a Republican observer at the Trumbull elections board.

After being told by precinct judges that she had already voted and could not vote again, she came to the board of elections, where she was allowed to cast a regular ballot, Garris said. Officials will investigate.

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