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Brunner says full review of Putnam County election woes to be conducted

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TOLEDO (AP) -- Another election, another problem with counting the vote.

This time, the trouble started with a record-setting flood in August that destroyed nearly all of the voting machines in Putnam County.

And it only got worse on Tuesday when glitches shut down a batch of replacement machines in the northwest Ohio county and some elections workers failed to follow advice from state election officials, said Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.

Results didn't come in until early Wednesday morning long after the polls had closed, leaving the winner of a congressional primary unknown for hours.

"We'll do a full review," Brunner said. "When one county fails, it can affect the voter confidence beyond that county."

A handful of problems slowed ballot counting in Cincinnati and Cleveland too.

In Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, a computer server uploading vote totals from memory cards shut down for about 30 minutes, Brunner said.

That type of failure posed a "significant concern," Brunner said, because the county will be processing many more votes next year in the presidential election.

Cuyahoga County's vote turnout was only 18 percent. Next year, it could be as high as 75 percent, said board of elections director Jane Platten.

"We have not identified why this issue is occurring. We do not believe it was a virus. Right now, I don't want to speculate on any of that," she said.

Some voters in the Cleveland area filled out paper ballots at a few places when polls first opened because workers couldn't get the electronic voting machines running. Platten blamed insufficient poll worker training.

"In some cases, they were just a little rusty," Brunner said.

The county has had problems in the past with poll workers showing up late or not at all to polling locations. In the May 2006 primary, results were delayed for days because thousands of ballots had to be counted by hand.

In the 2004 presidential election, Cuyahoga was among the Ohio counties with long lines and complaints over provisional ballots.

Counting was slow Tuesday in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, because a lot of first-time workers were in charge in several precincts, said Tim Burke, chairman of the board of elections.

Hundreds of Republican presiding judges were replaced by Democratic presiding judges because Gov. Ted Strickland won a majority of precincts in the county last year, Burke said.

State elections officials spent the last few months working closely with workers from the Putnam County Board of Elections after the August rains poured water into their office, ruining 108 voting machines. Only 28 others were salvaged.

That forced the board to borrow 140 touch-screen voting machines from Franklin County.

The borrowed machines used for the general election operated without a problem, but the ones used for a special congressional primary had glitches throughout the day, forcing voters to use paper ballots. Some voters were asked to come back later.

The problem was traced to flash cards, which include programming for the machines, said Ginger Price, director of the county's board of elections.

But workers compounded the delays when they picked up voting machines along with the memory cards after the polls closed and decided to count votes at polling sites, Brunner said.

The workers had been told not to start counting until the machines came back to the board of elections, Brunner said. "Our instructions weren't followed in every case," she said.

By starting the counting at polling places, workers handling the counting at the board were then faced with two different formats of data, she said.

"We didn't lose any data," Brunner said. "It was just a question of putting the data into a format that could be counted."

A message seeking comment was left Wednesday for the county's election director.

The board, Brunner said, also did not have any containers for paper ballots, which also delayed the counting, Brunner said.

"We ended up walking the board through every step of the process," she said.