Ohio Let Poll Workers Take Voting Machines Home

[Steve_MB]

Brunner: The Home Is No Place For Voting Equipment

There will be no more sleepovers with voting equipment in Ohio.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner issued a directive today forbidding the practice in Fairfield County and at least 22 other counties of having voting machines and other equipment taken home the night before an election by poll workers or others and brought to polling locations on Election Day.

With the eyes of the world expected to be on Ohio again for the presidential election this fall, the order is part of a series of directives Brunner has been issuing to address voting security, including one implementing a new law requiring bipartisan teams to handle and transport ballots…

WTF?? It took them until now to figure out that maybe it isn’t a good idea to let somebody have totally unsupervised access to the voting equipment and ballots? :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

[Oy]

Unbelievable.

[Giles]

@Steve MB

WTF?? It took them until now to figure out that maybe it isn’t a good idea to let somebody have totally unsupervised access to the voting equipment and ballots? :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

From 1999 to 2007, the Ohio Secretary of State was Ken Blackwell (R), and before that it was Bob Taft (R). Jennifer Brunner (D) obviously has different priorities from her eminent predecessors.

[MikeG]

[Cervaise]

@Steve MB

Brunner: The Home Is No Place For Voting Equipment

Hmmba gubba whaaAAA?

[iamthewalrus_3]

Oh, come on. I’m sure there’s a totally reasonable explanation for taking a voting machine home with you the night before the election.

Maybe voting machines are afraid of Democra^H^H^H^H^H^H the dark?

[SmartAleq]

Hey, thanks for the tip, SteveMB, I used your link to base my very first DailyKos blog on. I really liked the part about the pollworkers casting ballots on the machines at home–nope, no voter fraud in Ohio, not a bit of it!

[Quartz]

The mind just boggles that this was allowed in the first place.

[hotflungwok]

And you just know that the repubs will scream bloody murder if they can make up the slightest thing wrong with the ballots now that a Dem is in charge. The repubs have been dancing around a big elephant with a tarp over it, and every time the trunk moves or the elephant trumpets, the repubs go ‘What election fraud? You can’t prove anything, there’s no election fraud over here, it’s obviously their fault, not ours!’, and everyone just goes along with it.

[Plynck]

I suppose it’s too late now to apply for a job in an Ohio bank?

[Zebra]

Jesus H Christ.

[Baldwin]

And Ohio is still one of the states (like Florida) where the Secretary of State – the chief election official – is allowed to be working for one of the campaigns while overseeing the election. (I thought that had to be a mistake, the first time I heard it about Florida, back in 2000.)

[SmartAleq]

Yeah, amazingly coincidental how Ohio and Florida have been key players in dubious election results that gave Bush his two terms, huh?

And the 'pubs just keep saying “nothing to see here, move along!” :rolleyes:

[VinylTurnip]

Perhaps more incredibly, the one user comment (at present anyway) on that page is from someone criticizing Brunner’s decision…

[Cervaise]

I’m amazed this isn’t getting more attention.

[Captain_Amazing]

@iamthewalrus(:3=

Oh, come on. I’m sure there’s a totally reasonable explanation for taking a voting machine home with you the night before the election.

If I had to guess, the explanation would be that it would make things easier to set up that day. This way, the polling officials could pick the machines up ahead of time, and then take them with them on election day morning to the polling places. Otherwise, a special trip would need to be made the morning of election day to pick up the machines and take them to the polling places.

Taking the machines home means the election people don’t have to get up as early, in other words.

And, checking, AP mentions that was the reason they allowed it:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ilkmtvS1EIYL5Pg8fPge_QM8hVbAD92LJCFG1

Twenty-four of Ohio’s 88 counties have used sleepovers. Local elections officials argued that the practice makes it easier to take machines to polling sites. Otherwise, they would have to hire moving companies to distribute the machines at a cost of thousands of dollars.

Brunner said federal money will reimburse counties for the added cost, which she expects to be about $100,000 statewide. Elections officials also will be allowed to move and store the machines at polling places ahead of time, provided the sites have fire protection equipment and other security measures.

Counties may also set up regional storage locations where poll workers can pick up machines on the morning of Election Day and take them to polling locations.

Local officials, who have clashed with Brunner on a number of election procedure issues, were pleased that Brunner gave them the option of moving the equipment as they saw fit.

“She allowed for the counties to implement their own way of doing this,” said Shannon Leininger, director of the Ashland County Board of Elections. The county has used sleepovers for both paper ballots and its 204 touch-screen voting machines.

[Steve_MB]

@Captain Amazing

If I had to guess, the explanation would be that it would make things easier to set up that day. This way, the polling officials could pick the machines up ahead of time, and then take them with them on election day morning to the polling places. Otherwise, a special trip would need to be made the morning of election day to pick up the machines and take them to the polling places.

Taking the machines home means the election people don’t have to get up as early, in other words.

And, checking, AP mentions that was the reason they allowed it:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ilkmtvS1EIYL5Pg8fPge_QM8hVbAD92LJCFG1

It sounds like one of those situations where convenience was allowed to override security, without anybody stopping for a basic sanity check or consideration of how this would look from an impartial outside viewpoint.

[jk1245]

Be interesting to know what those 22 counties were, and what the results were.

While it’s quite possible this was on the up and up, and was done exactly for the reason stated, I can’t believe no one thought that it might appear improper.

Also, why hasn’t his come up before? Seems like something that would be noticed.

[mlees]

I believe that they did this for the Diebold machines in San Diego county a few years ago, too.

The problems they encountered wasn’t tampering, but that the machines, when turned on, booted up into an Operating System, and the polling place workers didn’t know/weren’t trained how to start the voting subprogram.

Edit: It was stated that the workers were allowed to take and store the machines at home to make for a more convenient and faster setup time in the morning. Supposedly, the machines were in locked (except for an “on” switch) cases to ensure no tampering. (I used a mail-in ballot, so I didn’t see the machines myself.)

[Phlosphr]

This is one reason Obama will win this presidential election…I think even if a fraction of the Clinton voters vote Obama, he’ll win Ohio on election day. And I think I saw a stat that said there was a very high percentage of Clinton voters now voting for Barack…