Cuyahoga County will use new voting system in primary

COLUMBUS (AP) — Ohio’s chief elections officer decided Friday to have the state’s most populous county switch to a new voting system in time for the March 4 presidential primary.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner broke a 2-2 tie for the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, which deadlocked a day earlier on the issue.

She had been pressuring the board to scrap its $21 million electronic touch-screen machines for an optical-scan system, in which a computer scans ballots that voters fill out by hand. She issued a report last week citing security flaws with the current system.

“I find that the move to a high-speed central count optical-scan system for paper ballots for the March 2008 primary election is the best way to ensure a safe, reliable and trustworthy primary election,” Brunner said in a letter to the director of the Cuyahoga board.

The county will lease equipment from Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems & Software for about $1 million. That includes high-speed scanners to tally primary votes downtown at the board of elections.

“The question is no longer can we do this,” said Jane Platten, the board’s director. “The situation is we must do this and we must do it right.”

One of the major jobs will be retraining poll workers.

Platten believes it won’t be a difficult transition because this system will be more simple to use.

“They don’t have the electronic devices to set up, it’s more of a paper management system now,” she said. “They’re already used to using the optical scan ballots at the precinct. They use them for provisional voting and curbside voting if someone can’t get out of their car.”