BREAKING NEWS: Ballot Shortages Reported in Some Ohio Precincts; Polls Stay Open Late

[Hissyspit]

Source: NBC News

No text.

Read more: www.msnbc.com

[soleft]

1. What's Sandusky County like?

[golddigger]

3. 92% white...n/t

[onehandle]

5. Ohio is nearly 90% White overall. What's your point? nt

[Hissyspit]

6. Is that where the Cedar Island rollercoasters are?

I've always wanted to go there.

[ellie]

8. Yes! Cedar Point

is the big amusement park right on Lake Erie. I used to work there in 1984. It's really nice. You should visit.

[Hissyspit]

9. I love rollercoasters.

Maybe I'll try to get there this summer.

[we can do it]

4. On Lake Erie, West Side of State

[madaboutharry]

2. Is this because of the bad weather today?

n/t

[DAMANgoldberg]

7. Yes

I'm in Lucas County (Toledo) right now, and the whole area is a skating rink with snow on top.

[brooklynite]

10. Solon (OH) polling place runs out of Democratic ballots

Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer

Steve Greenwald, 41, of Solon, said he and dozens of others could not vote at his precinct at Grantwood Golf Course because the precinct ran out of Democratic ballots. Poll workers would not allow the voters to use ballots from other precincts, or provisional ballots, he said.

Instead, they promised more ballots would be there in about five minutes. That was about 5:45 p.m., when he arrived to vote. He left at 7 p.m. without voting.

"I'm very upset," he said. "They should have been way better prepared, especially when they knew coming into this that they were going to have a high voter turn-out due to the tight Democratic race."

The folks kept coming, he said, and they gathered in the golf course ballroom, complaining to each other and spouses on cell phones. He heard that other precincts also ran out of ballots and that the Solon poll workers had told the Board of Elections around 3 p.m. that they needed more ballots.

Read more: http://blog.cleveland.com/openers/2008/03/xxxx.html

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It's not clear to me how any Election Board, knowing what the turnout has been, could be caught short on ballots.

[Auggie]

11. Make it difficult for Democrats to vote once and they may not bother to vote again

Fucking ballots are CHEAP to print! How could they run out????

[Dr.Phool]

12. Nobody has a copy machine around there?

[ladym55]

13. Why is it that Ohio just CANNOT get its act together?

Given the voter turnouts across the nation, the reason WHY Cuyahoga County didn't run enough ballots??? :grr:

[Igel]

16. Long after it's relevant, but there's an answer.

I think.

The optical scanners I had to deal with needed the pages they scanned to be printed with a special ink: That way it could ID where the bubbles were without thinking they were fill-ins. Similarly, they had to be filled in with fairly soft pencils.

Copiers probably don't have the right filler in the plastic they embed in the paper.


As for not having enough ballots, it's a crapshoot. You have a budget; wasting money is also bad. So you make a guess. Usually the guesses come out ok; there's no glory in doing your job right, just ask any boss, it's the bare minimum that's expected and there's no gratitude for it. However, screw up, and the powers that be are all over your ass, even if it's just rare and understandable. Could be worse: When it comes to DREs and lever machines, there's a fixed amount of equipment to go around, and there are usually written rules on how to allocate them--shifting voting patterns don't always fit well with the rules (but there's the usual ingratitude from the stern, taskmaster bosses that we all hate but, nonetheless, are).

[ladym55]

18. Thanks for your input.

It was helpful. It's just hard when it is ALWAYS Ohio and ALWAYS Cuyahoga County. The state ends up looking dumb. I know it has to be difficult to make everything work.

[Voltaire99]

14. In "the greatest country in the world," even the pretend elections don't work.

On the positive side, we throw puppies off cliffs real good.

[LiberalMandrake]

15. How comes nobody got the joke? Ballots .... voting machines.

Ballots, a joke to evoke the old world, when ballots were hand counted.
Reminder: Obama's role is to sell the "voting machines don't multiply Clinton's votes" message.

It's as simple as this: The script has 5 pct Clinton beating 1 pct McCain
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=script++%225+pct+Clinton%22+%221+pct+McCain%22

[AllyCat]

17. So nothing has been fixed in OH? No surprise there.

I trust no results in this election, but tallies from OH, FL, and NM are particularly suspect.