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Article published February 28,
2003
Still
messing with elections
It looks like the accuracy and reliability of elections in
Lucas County will continue to be held hostage indefinitely to antiquated voting
machines that are literally falling apart and should have been discarded years
ago.
How much longer this unconscionable threat to the electoral process
will be allowed to fester is anyone’s guess, but we know who’s to
blame.
It’s not the Lucas County Board of Elections, which recognized
problems with its deteriorating 40-year-old machines and was proceeding with a
$5 million plan for a state-of-the-art electronic voting system, to be put in
place starting this year.
The problem lies with foot-dragging in Congress
on funding, as well as administrative indecision by Secretary of State Ken
Blackwell, who stopped Lucas County cold this week by announcing that his office
will negotiate and award contracts on new voting equipment for every one of
Ohio’s 88 counties.
Congress, in a bill signed by President Bush last
Oct. 29, set a November, 2004, deadline for voting reform to be accomplished,
but initial money for new election equipment won’t be available until the end of
May at the earliest.
Meanwhile, Mr. Blackwell stunned the counties with
his unexpected decision to further stretch out the process by centralizing
contracts in Columbus. If this approach would lead to a uniform voting system
statewide, it might be justified; if not, it’s just one more roadblock to
reform.
Mr. Blackwell had been preaching a mantra that the elections
process is best run at the local level, telling county officials the federal
money was coming and they had to be ready to spend it.
Now the state’s
chief elections officer doesn’t even have a plan in place for counties to look
to and is just getting around to appointing a committee to come up with
one. The bottom line for Lucas County voters: They’ll be trusting their vote to
the old lever machines at least through the March, 2004, primary election. And,
given the state’s dithering, Joe Kidd, county elections director, says he
doesn’t see how a new system can be ready to go by the November, 2004 general
election.
By then, it will have been four long years since the disputed
presidential election of 2000 illustrated the serious damage to the political
process that can accrue when elections are poorly administered and employ
suspect voting machinery.
Lucas is one of only two Ohio counties that
still use the old lever machines, and those have ballot pointers that frequently
fall off, counters that malfunction, and write-in mechanisms that
fail.
What’s worse, 69 counties still use punch-card systems that have
been shown to be inaccurate enough to throw close contests in doubt. No one will
ever forget the Florida debacle and, although reforms have been made, we can’t
afford similar problems in Ohio.
A spokesman for Mr. Blackwell says the
secretary of state is committed to meeting the November, 2004, deadline set by
Congress. But it appears instead that he is simply being obstructionist and
dutifully doing his party’s bidding.
GOP state officials, members of
Congress, and the legislature first insisted that there were no problems from
the 2000 presidential contest that merited fixing. When evidence to the contrary
mounted, they took their time making funding available for the mammoth
nationwide effort.
To top it all off, the secretary of state is unsure
whether Ohio will get all of the $150 million it is supposed to receive under
the federal legislation. That means Lucas County may not get the electronic
voting system it was prepared to purchase.
So much for the cherished
Republican principle of local control.