By Brad Friedman on 11/8/2005, 1:33pm PT  

From Dayton Daily News... [emphasis added]

Election Day got off to a rough start Tuesday in some precincts in Montgomery County, where new touch-screen voting machines are being used for the first time.

The machines, which officials said are more accurate and are expected to speed up the vote-counting process, are being used in about half of Ohio's 88 counties, including Greene and Miami.
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Mike Petkus, 47, of Dayton said that when he went to cast his ballot at Kiser Middle School in north Dayton, he had the Northridge school board candidates on his touch screen rather than the Dayton school board.

He thought, ‘I don't have time to play games but this isn't right,' ” he said. As he was leaving the polling place to get to work, he said, “another guy was raising that same red flag.” “I think there was some very poor checking,” he said. Montgomery County Board of Elections Director Steve Harsman acknowledged there were some expected and unexpected problems, though he was pleased overall with the way things were running.
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His office received 30 to 40 calls from precincts reporting a “low paper error” on some of the machines even though each contained a new roll of paper.

Harsman believes the machines got jostled while moved to the polling locations, shaking a bracket and causing a sensor to go off.
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At one Washington Twp. precinct, two of the eight voting machines were reportedly taken out of service in the morning because of snafus.

In Miamisburg, a voter who went to cast his ballot at a precinct in the Miamisburg library at 7 a.m. said he wasn't able to vote because the new machines were displaying ballots for a Warren County precinct.

He said poll operators told him they had to cancel all the ballots of people who had tried to vote there earlier because they all said the wrong ballots were displayed.

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