Ohio is a Clusterfsck by Kevin

Things are so bad that the phone system for Franklin County crashed under the strain of voting compliants:

Franklin County’s phone system was returned to service about 90 minutes after it collapsed today under a crush of calls from voters and poll workers.

The volume of calls “overwhelmed the system,” Franklin County Elections Director Matthew Damschroder said.

Phones returned to normal about 9:30 a.m. The system also went down during the May 2 primary, delaying final returns until 2 a.m.

Damschroder said the system could not handle the quantity of calls from voters needing help to figure out where to vote and from poll workers needing help figuring out how to set up new electronic machines.

Polls opened at 6:30 today with relatively short lines but glitches at several polling places.

Looking at this map, Ohio is awash in voting problems.

Our electoral system is broken. It is long past time for a serious, national push to fix the problems. We need:

  • Standardized machines — ones that have paper ballots that the voter can check and that are saved for recounts
  • An end to allowing people who run the elections to also run campaigns.
  • More polling places and more poll workers
  • A national holiday on election day

And that is just to start. We have a joke of an election system and it is literally eating our democracy.

November 7th, 2006 in Politics

3 Comments

JanuszNovember 7th, 2006

In addition to Ohio, there are problems in Florida (and Indiana) with the new voting machines…programming errors are causing delays and frustration, and some precincts are resorting to using paper ballots. Once again there are problems in OH and FL?

We’re trying to export democracy, but we can’t seem to get the logistics of voting down ourselves?

Paul TomblinNovember 7th, 2006

It appears that the EIRS map has been “left-dotted”.

TimNovember 7th, 2006

Just a plug for my Home state.

Oregon has been doing vote-by-mail for over a decade with little muss or fuss. It’s cheaper, nullifies most of the blatant fraud (how ya going to deliver hundreds of ballots to the same address?), most of the blatant supression (your residence is your polling place), and spreads the voting out over two weeks, so last second foo-foo-rah is blunted.

Not only that, along with the ballot comes the state voting guide which unlike TV has at least some measure of equal oppurtunity in coverage, people can take their time, look up information that they feel they need to vote and not just hurry through a booth. Of course a paper trail is implicit in the system. Libraries double as voter drop-off locations. When the technology changes, then the issue is handled by professional full time time staff, not once every two years volunteers.

Now of course the system is not perfect, but we mostly get micro-frauds (children of recently deceased voting for their parents and the like). But it is better.

just some links for those interested in more

http://www.sos.state.or.us/executive/policy-initiatives/vbm/execvbm.htm

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/11/7/13535/4734