Article published March 06, 2008
Brunner, GOP at odds on election technology's success
By JIM PROVANCE
BLADE COLUMBUS BUREAU CHIEF
COLUMBUS - Ohio's top elections official and the Ohio Republican Party's second-in-command yesterday saw two entirely different elections.
"Paper ballots saved the day," said Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, the Democrat presiding over her first presidential primary election. But Kevin DeWine, the state GOP's deputy chairman, countered: "Not one electronic machine ran out of paper ballots. They don't rely on paper. It simply wasn't an issue."
After months of hand-wringing over electronic voting machines, much of the state's problems on Tuesday involved counties that don't use them.
Sandusky County, which uses paper ballots tabulated by optical-scan readers, ran short of ballots when its ballot-on-demand printer malfunctioned. A court order allowed the county to keep polls open until 9 p.m.
Democratic candidate Barack Obama's campaign convinced a federal judge to order several Cleveland polling places to reopen after the normal 7:30 p.m. close amid reports of ballot shortages and weather delays.
With a record primary voter turnout of 45 percent statewide, there were a few problems associated with touch-screen voting machines, including the misplacing of machine memory cards, that left Lucas County the last county to report complete election results.Flooding in 10 southern counties required the casting of provisional ballots at boards of elections instead of the usual polling places.
Still, Ms. Brunner gave the election a passing grade.
"Things that we could not control - like the weather, like bomb threats, like ice storms, like power outages - we were prepared for, especially with the backup paper ballots," she said. "That, despite some of the questions about it raised by election officials and others in the beginning, turned out to be something that put us much further ahead than other states that were counting their ballots last night."
Ms. Brunner had directed counties using electronic machines to have enough paper ballots on hand to handle at least 10 percent of registered voters. Statewide, the vast majority of those ballots went unused.
"Paper ballots enabled [Sylvania] Lucas County to keep voters voting when there were issues with the programming of machines," Ms. Brunner said. "They enabled voters in Darke County … to be able to vote when power went out and batteries would not keep the [touch-screen machines] working. The same thing in Knox County."
After problems in prior years with Cuyahoga County's touch-screen machines, Ms. Brunner ordered the county to use paper ballots this year with the ballots being transported at midday to a central location for scanning with optical-scan devices.
The experiment was seen as a dry-run for what Ms. Brunner would like to do statewide in November if lawmakers would agree to find $64 million to finance the conversion of 56 other counties that used touch-screen machines Tuesday.
Mr. DeWine, however, questioned the security of the transported ballots, noting at least one incident in which ballots were transported by two Democrats rather than a bipartisan team as required under a recently passed law.
"The vote count in Cuyahoga County last November was done by 1 a.m. on the electronic voting machine system that was thrown out," he said. "The count this March was not completed until about 6 a.m. [Wednesday]. They had less than 50 percent completed by 1 a.m. The word up there from our observers was that the warehouse where the board of elections was tabulating was pure chaos."
The law allowing midday pickup of ballots for Cuyahoga will expire on May 1 and is unlikely to be expanded to all counties.
House Speaker Jon Husted (R., Kettering) would not comment on the chances that lawmakers would find the funds for a statewide conversion to paper.
"Every system has its shortcomings," he said. "In the midst of this debate, we should learn from every election process.… As a primary, this election should have run smoothly, but the first piece of information that came to me was that the vote was being delayed over running out of paper ballots.
"It's a logical conclusion to note that electronic machines can't run out ballots," he said. "It doesn't mean those don't have their own set of shortcomings."
Contact Jim Provance at: jprovance@theblade.com or 614-221-0496.
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