Article published March 06, 2008
ELECTION 2008
Timely election results not in the cards for Lucas County
Local tally lags all of Ohio
By JOE VARDON
BLADE STAFF WRITER
Local elections officials yesterday morning finally found more than a dozen computerized voting machine memory cards in the back of a sheriff’s van and at the county’s elections office, making Lucas County the last in the state to file its election results — again.
The county’s vote totals were sent to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s office at about 11:45 a.m. The county was Ohio’s last to file in November, 2005, when it released results about 9 a.m. the morning after Toledo’s mayoral election.
Three years ago Jill Kelly, executive director of the Lucas County Board of Elections, blamed the county’s tardiness on a lack of paid volunteers.
This year the culprit appears to be the misplaced memory cards used to record votes from the Diebold Accuvote-TSX machines.
A total of 15 memory cards from two polling places were temporarily lost, and a single, faulty memory card was left at a third polling place the county couldn’t gain access to until yesterday morning.
| RESULTS |
 VIEW: Local and Regional election results
 LUCAS COUNTY: Board of elections results page
WOOD COUNTY: Board of elections results page
HANCOCK COUNTY: Board of elections results page
OTTAWA COUNTY: Board of elections results page
ERIE COUNTY: Board of elections results page
AREA ELECTION COVERAGE
CLINTON WINS: Main election story
TOLEDO LEVIES: Toledo voters give thumbs up to city, school tax requests
SENECA COUNTY COURTHOUSE: Courthouse bond issue rejected by 2-1 margin
NW OHIO - COUNTY RACES: Commissioners, sheriff's stable; judges, prosecutors see change
NW OHIO - LEGISLATIVE RACES: Gillmor holds an edge in state Senate contest
CONGRESS - 5TH & 9TH DISTRICTS: Latta way ahead of his GOP rivals
LUCAS COUNTY - GOP CENTRAL COMMITTEE RACES: Lucas County Republicans welcome fresh faces
REGIONAL: Most regional tax requests OK'd for parks, roads, fire departments
SUBURBAN TOLEDO: SCHOOL ISSUES: Northwood levy wins approval; Genoa taxes fail
GOP PRESIDENTIAL: Ohio helps McCain lock up nomination
NORTHWEST OHIO: SCHOOL ISSUES: Renewal levies pass; new taxes fare badly 3 districts in Hancock, Wood get OKs
OHIO POLLS: Shortage of ballots leads to extended voting hours in Ohio
SUBURBAN TOLEDO: BALLOT ISSUES: Sylvania Township fire levy shows early signs of success
PHOTO GALLERIES
 VIEW: Primary Day photos
VIEW: Barack Obama at UT
VIEW: Hillary Clinton visits Ohio
VIEW: Ohio primary photos
COMING UP
VIEW: Ohio Web site
VIEW: Ohio Democrats
VIEW: Ohio GOP
• DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION: Aug. 25-28, Denver, Colorado
• GOP CONVENTION: Sept. 1-4, Saint Paul, Minnesota
• ELECTION DAY: Nov. 4
• INAUGURATION DAY: Jan. 20, 2009 |
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Elections officials eventually secured each of those 15 missing cards — one bundle was in the elections’ office buried underneath other materials and another in the back of a van belonging to the county sheriff’s department. The single card locked inside a third polling place was recovered and officials verified that no votes had been recorded on it.
But the combination of the missing cards and the inabil-ity to immediately secure the single faulty card led to a long Tuesday night and yesterday morning for elections officials.
“The bottom line is, there were no lost votes,” said Ms. Kelly. “One hundred percent of the votes people cast counted.”
Ms. Kelly said each of the votes recorded on those 15 memory cards would have counted even if the cards were not located.
Unable to find those cards about 1:30 a.m., elections officials entered polling places at St. Catherine’s Catholic Church on North Lockwood Avenue and the Church of St. Andrew on Heatherdowns Boulevard — where those cards were used — and rerecorded the vote tallies off the machines and onto new cards.
According to Ms. Brunner, Lucas County reported all but one of its precincts by 6:30 a.m., about an hour after Cuyahoga County.
Ms. Kelly said the county had to wait until almost noon before reporting its last precinct to the state because it could not get into the Ottawa Park Nature Center on Kenwood Boulevard until later yesterday morning to retrieve a memory card that had been left there.
She said elections officials were told that no votes were recorded on that card because it wasn’t working properly, but they needed to verify that information to ensure no one’s vote was lost.
“We couldn’t just say, ‘Oh, we think that card was empty,’” Ms. Kelly said.
The county has 495 voting precincts and 207 polling stations. Each station has a number of the touch-screen voting machines, and each machine records the votes on a memory card assigned to it. The machines also have memory and create paper printouts as backups for security.
When each polling place closes, a precinct judge takes red nylon bags of those memory cards to one of seven substations.
Lucas County sheriff’s deputies transport the memory cards and ballots from the substations to the board of elections’ central office at One Government Center.
In the case of the memory cards that were found yesterday morning in the back of a sheriff’s office van, Dan Pilrose, Ms. Kelly’s deputy, said the snowy weather and icy roads led to those cards being misplaced.
“Most of [the transporting work] is done outside, and it was so cold people were probably just throwing this stuff in the back of the van and not thinking twice,” Mr. Pilrose said.
Mr. Pilrose also said Ms. Brunner’s mandate to have paper ballots available in addition to touch-screen voting also cluttered the vote-tallying process.
Ms. Brunner would like all Ohio counties to dump touch-screen machines and switch to paper ballots. She blamed Lucas County’s problems in this election on the touch-screen machines.
That is one of the difficulties of the [touch-screen machines] … the misplaced memory cards,” Ms. Brunner said.
“It takes very diligent poll workers and election officials to ensure that all of those memory cards come in,” she said.
Blade Columbus Bureau Chief Jim Provance contributed to this report.
Contact Joe Vardon at:jvardon@theblade.comor 419-410-5055.
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