huh? Ohio pulls plug on electronic voting: Blackwell opts for people filling out ballots by hand
The battle is over and electronic voting machines, at least in Ohio, are dead. After years of wrangling and protests, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell announced Wednesday that he will limit Ohio's uncompleted voting-machine conversion to a single device: the precinct-count optical-scan machine. The decision effectively sidelines the embattled touch-screen voting machines that protesters portrayed as razor-toothed, vote-eating monsters prone to hacking. An Ohio security review completed in December 2003 uncovered dozens of security risks in the machines, many of which companies were working to fix. Complicating matters was a recent state mandate that all electronic machines be equipped with expensive voter-verifiable paper backup systems, a technology for which the state had not yet laid out standards. "We have a tight election reform deployment schedule, too few allocated federal and state dollars and not one electronic voting device certified under Ohio's standards and rules," Blackwell said in a statement. Blackwell's order calls for optical-scan machines - which process paper ballots filled out by hand and fed into a computerized counter at the precinct - to be deployed statewide by November. Spokesman Carlo LoParo said these machines - long Blackwell's favored technology - produce the required paper record and are more flexible and affordable than electronic machines. Ohio has a limited pot of federal money to pay for the conversion.Two of Ohio's three authorized machine vendors - Diebold Election Systems, and Election Systems & Software - are cleared to provide optical-scan machines. [more]