I could post about 1000 links detailing the Hurricane Katrina that is the Ohio 2008 election(s). I can’t even begin to describe the utter total meltdown that is going to occur (except the media, Secretary of State, and election officials will say “no problems” but they also did that in 2004)

If you are a videographer there will be plenty of documentaries to be made. I know of five good ones that came out of 2004.

How is it that Brunner does this comprehensive test of voting machines, almost as good as CA Bowen’s review, but then fumbles it so badly. In case you haven’t seen any news on it, Cleveland is being ruled by edict and forced by Brunner to turn over their precinct based Diebold touchscreens for optical scan ES&S central count scanners. Brunner also forced through an emergency change to Ohio law to allow “mid-day” pickup of ballots. So not only did we lose precinct counting and reporting of results at the polls, but now we have two trips of ballots being carted around town with little chain of custody.

In the other half of the state, all places with DREs are required (and some counties are suing) to also provide paper ballots. Now this sounds great, until you look a little deeper. The paper ballots are only available upon request with no one telling the voters they can even request them. (Poll workers are told not to advertise this). They have only printed a very small number and if there is record turn out it won’t be nearly enough. They are printing 10% of 2000 or 2004 voted ballots. So, one, record turnouts. Two, population increases and more registered voters. Three, large numbers of people when polled said they would rather vote on paper. Four, almost no one trust touchscreens anymore. Now, the fun part of the story. These 10% paper ballots serve as the provisional ballots. So when they run out from regular voters who want to vote on paper, lots of voters will be disenfranchised. That is 5-20% of some precincts that are forced to vote provisionally. Oh yeah, those paper ballots will not be counted or even inventoried, but instead driven across town by a single poll worker in many cases to be centrally counted.

A few nightmare scenarios:
Internet folks will be crunching the numbers comparing the touchscreen results to the paper ballot results and they won’t match. The only explanations for this will be that somehow pro-evoting people tend to favor one candidate while paper fans tend to go another way. Or there is the age old stuffing the ballot box theory that will make NH results look reasonable. Did I mention that the study found all sorts of problem with touchscreens and yet they haven’t gone away or even addressed any security problems yet?

The lawsuits over the polling places that run out of ballots and also the dual nature of having two voting system will be like catnip to kittens for lawyers.

The only places that have any hope of clean elections are the few counties that currently use precinct based optical scan. But guess what, Brunner wants to try and force all of those places to move to central count for November. It is like taking all the best ideas of election integrity advocates and perverting them to end up with the easiest to cheat elections since [insert controversial election here].

For now, Brunner’s ideas about keeping polls open for 15 days in malls and other unsecured locations has died down. But we shall see what gets pushed out for November.