General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Recount Won't Change the Election, Since Pennsylvania Has No Paper Trail [View all]Ms. Toad
(34,069 posts)Last edited Sat Nov 26, 2016, 01:13 AM - Edit history (1)
Voting machines in Ohio are a county-by-county decision. Both for which machines are used and what features are active (unless prohibited by the state). In other words, the state puts a fence around all of the possible machines/options. Within that fence, it is a county-by-county decision.
There are 10 different voting machine systems in Ohio. There are two separate features discussed in the articles I found. An audit feature - which has nothing to do with a recount - and a new feature on some new machines that take images of ballots and store them (I'm not familiar with that feature - and I haven't found a formal description of it. It would likely have been a handfjul of counties, since the only discussion I can find of new voting machines in Ohio was written in September - and discussed a future move to replace aging voting machines.
As near as I can tell from your description and the reports I've found, the Ohio AG permitted counties to choose to turn off either the audit feature OR a new imaging feature. The description of the process for turning it off was a drop-down box. A description that specific would not be universal across venders - so, again, it would impact - at most - only the counties that used that particular machine.
Of the counties 48 vote by touch screen (two kinds); 40 vote using paper ballots (6 kinds of machines, including the larger cities of Cleveland, Akron, and Cincinnati). So (without counting up county-by-county vote totals) likely about half of Ohio votes are on paper. {ETA: This doesn't add to 10 systems, because the system includes at least a scanner and one that can be used by an unsighted person and not every county that used a particular scanner chose the same ADA machine, and some counties used more one type of scanner - so there are 10 systems, using some combination of 2 touch screen machines, 6 scanners, and one ballot marking device}
ETA#2: I've spent a fair amount of time searching now. I cannot find any reports of new voting machines (or newly added ballot protection technology. According to Verified Voting, only 5 counties changed systems. They went from touch screen to paper ballots. All of the reports of this trace back to Bob Fritakis or Greg Palast, and refer to an unidentified case in an unidentified court, about an unidentified county. (The hearing took place in Columbus, but that could have been Franklin County in a lower-level state court, or any county in the Supreme Court.) In short, the reports don't give any to track down precisely which machines were involved. (I can't find any reference to the newly added technology described by Fritakis/Palast anywhere - even outside of Ohio.) One person who referenced "state-of-the-art" machines in Ohio, but lives in California, so would be unlikely to have any direct knowledge.