Problems in my small rural county as well.  Couldn't get the machines to work at all until 7:15.  The poll workers said they spent 45 minutes arguing with the Diebold people.  When I came in at 7:30 AM only one machine worked

It really scares me that someone with a messianic vision for himself is in charge of the voting process in Ohio.

in Clermont County.
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/a rticle?AID=/20060502/NEWS01/605020350/10 77

Partisan politics at work?
Democrats stymied by GOP in Clermont
BY HOWARD WILKINSON | ENQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Tonight, every county board of elections in Ohio will have one Republican director and one Democratic deputy director supervising the counting of votes to ensure that it is done fairly.

Every county, that is, except Clermont - where there will be a Republican director but no Democrat deputy. That's because of a dispute between the Republicans and Democrats on the county Board of Elections.

This is the necessary result of having hyper complicated technologies -- computer voting -- at the actual ground zero of political power. Anything can be made to happen because ordinary people have absolutely no ability to control the technology, while rich and powerful people have total control over it. That is why we must go back to hand counted paper ballots, with the counting observed by citizens, and with results announced at each polling station prior to being sent up into larger pools. We will never achieve these reforms without massive voter revolt. Remember, voting is not a privilege, but an act of war. People vote for the same reason they march off to defend their nation, and they don't expect to stop the enemy single-handedly. They will throw rocks at tanks if they have to, and if they have true belief in their cause, they eventually will win. Consider:

Supreme Court Denies Standing & Allows Costs Against Voting Rights Activist

In what appears to be a punitive measure, the Supreme Court let stand the Third Circuit's judgment to tax court costs against Landes as the plaintiff, an unusual move in a civil rights case.  The Third Circuit's ruling ignored previous U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in Christiansburg Garment Co. v. EEOC (1978) and Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc.(1994).  In the latter case, Justice William Rehnquist  stated,  "... we found (it) to be the important policy objectives of the Civil Rights statutes, and the intent of Congress to achieve such objectives through the use of plaintiffs as "`private attorney[s] general.'"

Something similar to this idea was put into practice last winter in North Carolina.  According to a February 6, 2005 editorial in the Ashville Citizen-Times, "...a voting machine error ...caused 4,400 votes to vanish in Carteret County. As (candidate) Troxler led in the count by 2,287 votes in a race that saw more than 3 million votes cast, the missing votes threw the outcome into disarray. Troxler's campaign rounded up affidavits from more than 1,400 Carteret voters who said they had voted for him."  As a result, his opponent conceded.

Also stay in touch with:

count paper ballots

and:

Velvet Revolution

We've set up a page for people who experience voting irregularities to report their experiences at the Strickland for Governor website:

http://www.tedstrickland.com/page/s/irre gularities

We're hearing stories of people being turned away, finding closed polling locations or having malfunctioning machines as mentioned above.  This is about fair and honest elections, and we must have a record of what went wrong so that we can assure future elections go right.

Jesse Taylor
Strickland for Governor

And if the dems in charge don't get their hair on fire Ohio will see Sen. DeWine again, Gov. Blackwell, and CA will for sure see Gov. Schwarzenegger.  

I won't give $$$ to Ohio dems (which I have before) again unless I see strong evidence of appreciation for the magnitude of this issue with suitable legal clout behind it.

He can't run an election. How the Hell will he run Ohio?

Are these problems happening mostly in Dem districts, or both Dem and Repub?

People were having problems in my polling station today - definitely technology related ones.  The poll workers were doing their best, but they looked like they had had about 15 minutes of training.  EVERYONE was falling back on one kid (probably no more than 18 himself), who could make the computers work.  Most of the poll workers were easily in their 60s and didn't seem to like the computer systems at all.

And some of the poor schlubs around me had all kinds of problems.  one guy didn't follow the instructions quite right (the poor guy was wrestling with his 3-year-old while trying to vote) and accidentally turned off the video and put it on "audio only" for the blind.  No one could get it back to video mode, so he was trying to wrestle with a three-year-old, fumble with headphones, and cast his ballot.

And, for the record, this is a moderately Republican suburban district with lightweight voters - I think the presidential election two years ago was the only time there's ever been a line when I've gone at 7:30am.  This year, there were a dozen people there when I got there waiting, and probably at least that many there when I left.  I can only guess what kinds of problems are going on in downtown Columbus and Cleveland today.

Here we go again....

A court has ordered a precinct in Cuyahoga County to remain open until 9:30 p.m. The Secretary of State's office, therefore, will not report results until after all polling locations are closed.

Cleveland Plain Dealer
6:28 p.m.

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections will delay the counting of more than 17,000 absentee ballots until Midnight, potentially slowing the unofficial final results of some close races. In prior elections, absentee ballots were the first votes counted, Bob Bennett, chairman of the board, announced late Tuesday afternoon.

Board employees will have to count the absentee ballots by hand because the new electronic machines that read the ballots malfunctioned Tuesday morning during testing. Exactly when the count will be completed is unclear.

Bennett said the board will launch an investigation Wednesday into the problem. The machines are made by Diebold Elections Systems, which also makes the touch-screen voting machines used at the polling locations.

Bennett also announced that the polling location at the Garden Valley Neighborhood House, 7100 Kinsman Ave. in Cleveland, will remain open until 9:00 pm because poll workers did not open the location until 1:30 pm.

-- Mark Naymik