“Did you hear that? My machine just called me ‘liberal swine!'”
As Cuyahoga County election officials muddle through the now-familiar ritual of picking new voting machines for the November election — we hear it’s a big one — there’s a creepy feeling of déjà vu to the proceedings.
Let’s go to the instant-replay booth: First, we had the Diebold touch-screen machines, which were so bad that one upstanding citizen took it upon himself to beat one up. Then, in March, we switched to the old-fashioned optical scanners, which were fine, except they didn’t allow ballots to be scanned at the actual polling place.
Now the state is forcing the county to buy new machines that will read ballots on site. …
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2008.
What a waste. The Diebold machines worked perfectly well…they didn’t let Jennifer Brunner fix the election, but they worked pretty well.