Recently discovered problems with the paper records produced by electronic voting machines in Cuyahoga Country, Ohio, could make a recount after next year’s presidential election a disaster. More than 20 percent of the paper printouts from touch-screen voting machines were found to be unreadable. The recount was necessary because the vote counting software crashed twice on election night and the margin of victory was one-half of one percent or less. Election workers found the unreadable ballots while conducting a recount of two races, which involved only 17 of the county’s 1,436 precincts. Board of Elections director Jane Platten says recounting the ballots for the entire county in the 2008 presidential election could take more than a week. Cuyahoga County uses Premier Elections Solutions (formerly Diebold) touch-screen voting machines that store votes on a memory card inside each machine. During the election a paper record of each vote is printed on a long reel of paper that is stored inside the machine. The paper record is used during recounts, but can be damaged or unreadable, usually because of a paper jam while printing. Premier Elections Solutions’ Chris Riggall says the company will investigate the situation.
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