Preparing for the Future Voting Problems in Ohio

The Ohio association of election officials have met in in Columbus, Ohio to make the decisions that will hand the next election to republicans (or as they call it create a "fair election process"). The big news from this meeting "officials" (almost all republicans) is that secretary of state, Ken "part of team Bush" Blackwell directed the boards of election in each of Ohio's 88 counties to decided between two optical scan vote counting systems by February 9th. Now, what is interesting about this is whether or not election officials can make an important decision like this in less than two weeks!!

The two systems are made by ES&S and Diebold. With the passage of legislation in Ohio last April requiring a voter verified paper audit trail by 2006 (no, Ohio currently cannot verify all votes via paper...) only
these two vendors have equipment certified for use in Ohio.

Both systems are optical scan systems that read paper ballots marked by the voter with a #2 lead pencil similar to the SAT, ACT or other multiple choice tests, alas no essay. Only three practices are planned in Ohio and of course we can all expect any "kinks in the machines" to be completely worked out by then. Yeah, right.

All I have to say is that several of these machines, especially the Diebold were problems in the Florida counties using Diebold voting machines in November '04. That inspires confidence, right?