Problems slowed the process of getting voting results

Some poll workers in Mahoning County weren't properly trained.
VINDICATOR STAFF REPORT
Problems with absentee ballots and tallying vote totals after the polls closed were largely responsible for delays in the release of election results in the Mahoning Valley.
Results in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties weren't available until between 12:30 and 2 a.m. Wednesday even though the polls closed at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Mahoning County residents have used electronic touch-screen voting machines since 2002. But Tuesday's primary was the first with a state-required paper trail add-on.
Poll workers in Youngstown, Struthers and Campbell were incorrectly trained last month about how to close polls on the new equipment, said Thomas McCabe, Mahoning elections board director.
The training error was in the manual given to the elections board by Election Systems & amp; Software, its voting machine vendor, McCabe said.
When the training error was discovered, poll workers were given the correct information but not brought in for retraining, he said.
Poll workers in about 25 to 30 precincts, primarily but not only in Youngstown, Struthers and Campbell, had trouble closing the machines, McCabe said.
Also, because of a delivery issue with the machines, many poll workers were trained without the new equipment, said Mark Munroe, the board's vice chairman.
"A lot was happening in a compressed period of time," he said. "It was a real challenge with the late delivery of the equipment. But by and large we escaped without a catastrophe."
How help was provided
The elections board had people traveling to voting precincts Tuesday helping poll workers collect the voting information, while other elections board employees "walked poll workers through the process on the phone," McCabe said.
"We didn't think retraining was necessary," he said. "They've closed machines for four years. We didn't think it would be a problem. We thought it would be easy, but it wasn't."
The board may consider having poll worker supervisors and presiding judges attend two training sessions in the future instead of one, and needs to work on emphasizing how to close the machines when the election ends, McCabe said.
Another problem in Mahoning was counting absentee ballots. The county uses paper ballots counted by optical scanner machines for absentee votes.
The county's central voting system machine didn't initially recognize the software used on one of the two optical scanners, Munroe said. It took about an hour to rectify that problem, he said.
McCabe is quick to point out that nearly every large county in Ohio experienced delays Tuesday.
Most of those problems dealt with poll workers' being unfamiliar with new voting equipment, poll workers who failed to show up for work and some equipment failures.
"We have improvements to make, but we aren't alone in this," McCabe said.
Write-in factor
Minor delays in releasing results in Mahoning and Columbiana counties were caused by the successful write-in campaign of state Sen. Charlie Wilson as the 6th Congressional District Democratic nominee.
"But it was a one-time diversion," McCabe said.
Wilson proved to be popular with voters even outside the 6th District. Wilson ran an expensive campaign urging voters to write his name on the ballot. Wilson received some votes as a write-in in the Republican primary for the 17th Congressional District seat in Mahoning County, McCabe said.
Also, a Boardman voter took Wilson literally when he asked people to write in his name. The man used a pen and wrote Wilson's name on a touch-screen voting system, Munroe said.
Election night in Trumbull County was going along just great -- poll workers had a good grip on how to operate their new voting equipment and had made it back to the board of elections with their results right on time.
Trumbull elections officials expected final results to be released much earlier than 1:35 a.m. Wednesday, when they were finished.
For about two hours, officials counted votes from the county's Diebold touch-screen voting machines and began to count paper ballots that were used by absentee voters.
Paper ballots
But the paper ballots took longer to compile than anticipated, Director Kelly S. Pallante said.
"We don't want to have that happen in the future," the elections director said Wednesday, explaining that the protocol selected for counting the paper ballots this time was obviously not the right one and something better will be figured out for the next election.
The lateness had nothing to do with the touch-screen machines, Pallante said. It had to do with the order in which elections officials decided to count paper ballots.
Elections officials had counted the paper ballots early in the night during the November 2005 election, the first time this voting system was used countywide, Pallante said. But they decided to count them after the touch-screen votes this time to improve accuracy.
That turned out to be more time-consuming than expected, Pallante said.
Before the county went to its present system of touch-screen voting machines and paper ballots, results were usually available around 11 p.m. Pallante said she will be striving to get back to that time frame in upcoming elections.
Mahoning and Trumbull released what officials referred to as final unofficial results, only to realize there were mistakes. Those results were replaced by corrected unofficial results.
Myke Clarett, a secretary of state field representative, went to the Columbiana County board after The Vindicator questioned the county's decision to not count the absentee votes. Clarett insisted the board count absentee ballots Tuesday, and the board complied.
State action
The state Legislature approved a bill earlier this year with that requirement, but after objections from elections officials statewide about the change, it was quickly reversed, said James Lee, a secretary of state spokesman.
The secretary of state issued a directive to all 88 county elections boards in Ohio about the change and another about the reversal, Lee said.
Columbiana County's elections director Lois Gall said she did not see or receive a directive from the state to count the absentee ballots.
Gall said Wednesday, "We were caught completely off guard. We were not prepared to do it, but we did."
The outcomes of issues as indicated by preliminary results didn't change.
Still to be counted are any write-in votes among what turned out to be 1,168 absentee ballots, and any walk-in votes at the polls on election day. No numbers were available.
Before the change in counting, the board thought results might be in by 9 p.m. or shortly thereafter Tuesday. That's close to the norm.
But Gall said that just opening the sealed absentee votes in preparation for counting took more than an hour. The final results were counted at 12:43 a.m. Wednesday.
There were no glitches with the county's new scanning system and no reports of voters' not being able to cast ballots.
Minor problems
Gall said a few poll workers had some anxiety about the new system that resulted in minor problems setting up and taking down the systems. Gall said that the workers were advised to follow the step-by-step instructions they had.
But two precincts, both in Perry Township, were the last to reach the elections board in Lisbon about three hours after the polls closed.
Poll workers had paper records of the number of ballots they gave out and electronic records of the number of ballots cast. Workers must reconcile those numbers before leaving the polls. One precinct had a problem reconciling its votes. The other precinct had no problem, but a worker with the results was waiting for a ride to Lisbon from a worker at the first poll.
Gall said she had no time to determine what happened.
The county had five riders who traveled the county to troubleshoot any problems with the new system. Gall said had the delay gone on longer, she would have sent someone to the township to get the ballots.