Fitrakis & Wasserman: Ohio's Diebold Debacle

Yay! I'm finally back online! I was just now able to download my e-mail, and it included several articles via "keyword news"--that's how I get my Ken Blackwell updates. Several of the articles were about Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman withdrawing from the governor's race, and one was about Republican candidate Jim Petro's ad "trumpeting his conservative abortion beliefs". Finally, there was this piece from Scoop in New Zealand, originally published in the Free Press:

Ohio's Diebold Debacle: New machines call election results into question
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

Massive Election Day irregularities are emerging in reports from all over Ohio after the introduction of Diebold's electronic voting in nearly half of the Buckeye State’s counties. A recently released report by the non-partisan General Accountability Office warned of such problems with electronic voting machines.

E-voting machine disasters

Prior to the 2005 election, electronic voting machines from Diebold and other Republican voting machine manufacturers were newly installed in 41 of Ohio’s 88 counties. The Dayton Daily News reported that in Montgomery County, for example, “Some machines began registering votes for the wrong item when voters touched the screen correctly. Those machines had lost their calibration during shipping or installation and had to be recalibrated. . . .”

Steve Harsman, the Director of the Montgomery County Board of Elections (BOE), told the Daily News that the recalibration could be done on site, but poll workers had never performed the task before.

The city of Carlisle, Ohio announced on November 22 that it is contesting the results of the November 8 general election as a result of Montgomery County vote counting problems. Carlisle Mayor Jerry Ellender told the Middletown Journal that the count on the city’s continuing $3.8 million replacement fire levy is invalid “since they are not sure if Carlisle voters received the right ballots on the new electronic voting machines.”

Harsman, according to the Journal, said, “poll workers incorrectly encoded voter cards that are used to bring up the ballots on the electronic machines in precincts in Germantown and Carlisle.”

At least 225 votes were registered for the fire levy in precincts with only 148 registered voters, according to the Journal. In addition, 187 voting machine memory cards were lost for most of election night in Montgomery County, according to the Dayton Daily News.

Read the rest here.

In case you don't recall, reports from the Free Press were an extremely valuable source of information in trying to get to the bottom of the "irregularities" in the 2004 election. And I just found out a little while ago that today is Bob Fitrakis' birthday. So, happy birthday, Bob, and thank you for everything you do to make sure those who count the votes are held accountable.



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