Candidates and voters in Athens County went to sleep without knowing the results of yesterday's local races, thanks to a mechanical problem that the county's Board of Elections worked through the night to put to bed.
Because of an error with the board's new, $45,000 optical speed-reader, the county was the last in the state to begin turning in its tallies.
The board had expected the ballot scanner, purchased from Electronic Systems and Software, to be faster than the optical reader used for primaries, board Director Debbie Quivey said. Elections workers noticed partway through the counting that the reader was moving more slowly than they expected and occasionally would stop, forcing workers to resend some ballots.
Board members contacted an Electronic Systems technician around 2 a.m. to help fix the slow processing, but his arrival was delayed when he hit a deer on his way to the board, Quivey said.. The technician found a problem with the calibration of the machine that affected the speed of processing but no the accuracy of the counting, she said.
No one had any way of knowing this
Quivey said around 3 a.m. I'm not very happy with it right now. G? This is a piece of machinery. You never know what a machine is going to do.
The problem with the optical scanner delayed the tabulation of results until after 5 a.m. because the machine does not compile totals until all of the ballots are processed.
That postponement also was partly because of the delayed tallying of more than 2,500 absentee ballots the board opened Monday but didn't start counting until after the polls closed at 7:30 p.m. An unexpected number of provisional ballots also put volunteers behind schedule, Quivey said.
The polls were busy from open to close, with a high turnout that reminded Quivey of a presidential election. 3.7 million voters went to the polls in Ohio yesterday, not including Athens County.
Athens County Prosecutor C. David Warren warned voters to be wary of calls falsely telling voters their precincts were changed. Similar calls also occurred in the 2004 elections, Board of Elections Chairwoman Susan Gwinn said.
Quivey said she hadn't heard that such calls happened this year.
In the 2004 elections, there was an additional problem in Athens County in which misleading signs told voters, Democrats Vote Tomorrow. Republicans and Undecided Vote Tuesday.' Kantele Franko contributed to this report. 17
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Debbie Phillips attempts to find out the voting results for Athens County last night while watching national election results on CNN with the Athens County Democrats and OU College Democrats in The Blue Gator.
