Electronic voting system didn't live up to fanfare

There was some spinning going on election night Tuesday at the Mahoning County Board of Elections and it wasn't all coming from the candidates or their mouthpieces. Elections officials tried their best to put a positive spin on the failure of the $2.9 million electronic voting system to provide the final results by the 10 p.m. deadline set by them, but when the clock showed 11:40 p.m., there weren't many buyers.
Clearly, Tuesday's countywide launch of the system was inauspicious. As Vindicator reporters noted in a news story Wednesday, the results from Trumbull County were available at 10:26 p.m., while those from Columbiana County came in at 9:57 p.m. Both counties use the punch-card system, which gained national notoriety in the 2000 presidential election in Florida. With all the talk about hanging chads and dimpled chads, Mahoning County elections officials decided that high-technology was the way to go when they were looking for a system to replace the paper ballots and optical scanners that had been in use for many years.
With the touch screen voting terminals in the polling places and high-speed computerized tabulators in the board's headquarters, there were high expectations for a relatively trouble-free election. But something unexpected happened: voters turned out in greater numbers than had been anticipated, creating chaos in some precincts and an overload at the board of elections.
The result was a system that failed to live up to the fanfare that surrounded its purchase by the four-member (two Democrats and two Republicans) board of elections.
Elections officials have promised to "tighten up" the system before the next election. But they need to do more.
Postmortem
There must a postmortem of Tuesday's general election that focuses on the shortage of voting terminals in some polling places, the amount of time voters had to wait in line before voting, and the reasons the system crashed while the votes were being tabulated. We would strongly urge the board to ask the Ohio Secretary of State's Office to send in their staffers with expertise in voting equipment so as to ensure independent input.
Following the review, the board should make the findings public and also explain to the voters how it intends to prevent similar problems from occurring in the future.
There's a reason we're pushing for a public discussion of what went wrong: The taxpayers need to feel confident that the votes they cast were not jeopardized by the software glitches.
A satisfactory explanation for what happened would also reassure the secretary of state's office that Mahoning County made the right decision in buying this system. That's important because the board of elections is hoping to recover most, if not all, of the $2.9 million cost from the state, which has received millions of dollars from the federal government to help counties pay for new voting systems.