Voting in Ohio May 2?

Well, if you live in Summit County you may want to seriously consider absentee ballots. The Akron Beacon Journal tells you this today:

Optical-scan cards show improvement
By Lisa A. Abraham Beacon Journal staff writer

A new shipment of computer memory cards for voting equipment at the Summit County Board of Elections continued to experience failures Thursday — but at a lower rate than those tested earlier in the week.

Testing was expected to continue today on the latest batch of memory cards received by the elections board from Election Systems & Software, the Omaha, Neb., company that manufactured the county’s new optical-scan voting system.

Sure they aren’t perfect, but they’re getting better. They might even be almost perfect by the time the primaries roll around. I know it makes me feel better about the new electronic voting machines (Tuscarawas County’s haven’t even come back from Illinois yet- Diebold is having such a hard time we have to share voting machines now).

I know you’re wondering what the failure rate of these babies is/was.

After success with the initial 177 cards tested this week, the remaining 348 cards began to experience a failure rate as high as 30 percent. The company has since shipped hundreds of new cards to the county this week.

The most recent shipment, which arrived Thursday, had a 10 percent failure rate, said Bryan Williams, elections board director. The new voting equipment should include 525 of the cards, which are loaded into machines that read ballots.

Do you think a local election could turn on a 10% rate of failure? Darn tootin’, bucko. GW won Ohio by right around 100,000 votes (it makes my head hurt to look up the exact figure). Now that’s a national election. So unless someone on the local level wins by 61% there’s always going to be a question.

Donofrio said the board was expecting Thursday’s shipment to include only memory cards made by the company that made the original 177 that tested successfully, but that wasn’t the case.

“They’ve been referring to the cards as finicky,” she said of ES&S. “If that’s the case, if they work fine in May, will they work fine in November? I would advocate for an entire new batch of cards. We don’t need any problems (in the future) that we can head off now,” she said.

That’s a very good question. Will they work in November? Which party does ES&S donate money to and how much do they donate? That should tell us something about how that’s going to turn out. But, wait, there’s even better news- this time for all Ohioans.

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell hired a consulting company to come in and test all the new voting equipment before it is used in any election. That testing began Monday.

That certainly makes me feel all warm and fuzzy because we all know that Ken Blackwell is the epitomy of honesty.