On Tuesday night at a special board meeting, the memory cards from all the optical scan and touch screen machines were run again and the provisional votes, all 75 of them, were added together.
“There were no changes in the results when we certified the results,” said Jane Saddler, deputy director of the Scioto County Board of Elections.
The process went more smoothly than the last election in the fall when a laundry list of problems, including contracted technicians who couldn't get vote tallies to upload and paper ballots that were a couple of hair widths too wide, lead to the unofficial results not being available until 5 a.m. the next day.
Even the certification of the ballots took six hours to complete because of the ballot width and ballots where the voter didn't follow the instructions and the board had to decide to accept or reject them.
Some voters circled the name of the candidate or circled the oval. To be scanned, there has to be some dark marks in the oval for the optical scan system to read it.
Saddler said the primary election went “very well.”
For the primary election, voting machine company Diebold had a technician on hand on election night and for the certification.
“It went pretty smooth this time compared to the fall,” she said. She added that the only problem was that the batteries failed in a couple of memory cards.
“But that was taken care of by replacing the batteries and re-running the precinct,” she said.
Saddler said the election workers had more training in using the new systems. One of the things they learned was that all of the memory cards from a polling site had to be run together, not as they came in.
“It's just been little things like that,” Saddler said. There has been additional training for both poll workers and board of election workers had three days of programming training, something they didn't have before.
All counties in Ohio were required to update their voting systems because of a federal law passed after punch-card ballots came under scrutiny in the presidential election fiasco in Florida in 2000.
According to the Ohio Secretary of State's office, of the 44 counties that switched over to computerized voting systems for the last election in November and most counties went with a touch screen system.
Scioto County, along with Auglaize and Brown counties, got the optical scan system.
MARK SHAFFER can be reached at (740) 353-3101, ext. 235.
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