Bad news and/or good news, depending on how you wish to look at it…
First this…
UPDATED: 5:22 pm EST February 29, 2008
CLEVELAND — The first public tests of the new optical scanners at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections have failed.
Chief Investigator Duane Pohlman reported that the board ran two tests of the scanners on Friday, and during both tests, the computer repeatedly showed an error message.
Followed by this reassuring(?) update to the same article, posted 57 minutes later…
UPDATED: 6:19 pm EST February 29, 2008
CLEVELAND — The third time was the charm for pretest of the new optical ballot scanners at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.
Chief Investigator Duane Pohlman reported that the board ran two tests of the scanners on Friday, and during both tests, the computer repeatedly showed an error message.
However, a third test ran successfully.
The Board of Elections said previous tests of the scanners were successful, and officials do not know why the scanners did not initially read the ballots.
Pohlman reported that the BOE is looking into possibly having a batch of bad disks.
Friday’s tests were public pretests that are required by law.
Why must it always come down to Ohio?
…… why indeed.
What’s the makeup of voting technology now in OH? There has been some change to the DREs hasn’t there?
SoS Brunner recommended all counties dump their DREs. But unless I’m mistaken, other than Cuyahoga, I don’t know if any of them did. The Republican election directors colluded against her any way they could.
In Cuyahoga, the board was tied on whether to move from DRE to op-scan, and Brunner, therefore, was able to cast the deciding vote in favor of the move to op-scan.
For the record, many of my Election Integrity friends were strongly against the move, given the short time they had to change systems. I parted ways with them on that one, and agreed with Brunner that they should go to paper (though precinct-based would have been much much smarter than central op-scan, which she and I differed about).
We’ll see how it goes. Should be a really “fun” week for The BRAD BLOG next week…yeesh…seatbelts fastened.