EDITOR’S NOTE: We inquired of the Andrea McCue at the County Commissioners office concerning the type of optical scanning machines used here and received the following assurance: “ I checked with Mary Stehman and fortunately, our Hart InterCivic optical scan machines have never experienced any of the noted problems in their six years/ twelve elections of use.”
From USA TODAY:The federal agency responsible for inspecting voting equipment said Thursday that a ballot scanner used in several key battleground states can freeze up without warning, fail to log errors and misread ballots.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission said the ballot reader, made by Omaha-based ES&S, is not in compliance with federal standards. And while it’s the first time the 8-year-old agency has taken such a step, it falls just short of decertification — a move that could force election officials to abandon the machines on the eve of the 2012 presidential primaries…
Jane Platten, the Cuyahoga County elections director, said the county had to switch to shorter ballot pages to fix the problems, and later reached a $208,197 settlement with the company. Later fixes offered by ES&S also led to system freezes, so the county went back to the previous, flawed software as “the devil we know,” she said…
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