Was reading the news this morning waiting for philodoxdreams to come home and saw this little tidbit:
Among the findings in one report prepared by the Cuyahoga Election Review Panel:
- Due to poor chain of custody for supplies and equipment, 812 voter-access cards (which voters place in touch-screen machines to cast their ballot) were lost, along with 215 card encoders, which program the voter-access cards. Three hundred thirteen keys to the voting machines’ memory-card compartments, where votes are stored, also went missing.
- Officials set up two user accounts on the computer running vote-tabulation software, then assigned one password to both accounts and allowed multiple people to use them, thwarting any effort to identify individuals who might access and alter the system. Sixty Board of Election employees took touch-screen machines home a weekend before the election to test a procedure for transmitting data on election night.
- The election board hired 69 taxis to transport observers to precincts to collect memory cards and paper rolls on election night. But many cab drivers ended up gathering the materials themselves, and about half the cabs returned to the warehouse with election data, but no observer.
- In at least 79 precincts the number of voters who signed the poll books didn’t match the number of ballots cast. At least eight precincts had more ballots cast than registered voters. Because some polling places served several precincts, some of the discrepancies are explained by voters being directed to the wrong machines, an error that did not result in uncounted votes. But even when investigators tallied ballots and signatures for all precincts in a polling place, 15 locations still had mismatches. In one case investigators found 342 more voters than ballots.
Copied from Wired News: Ohio Election Portends Trouble… Yah that raises my confidence in the validity of our whole election system.