Voters Experience Problems at the Polls

Reported by Tino Ramos and Kurt Ludlow

Voters have been at the polls all morning casting their votes on everything from Ohio's governor to school levies.

For a lot of people, it's their first time on the new voting machines and already there have been a few glitches.

At Maryland Avenue Elementary in Baxley, they're getting their first run at the new electronic voting machines, and these new machines posed some pesky problems.

About 20-percent of the polls in Franklin County didn't have voting opened on time, but election officials say its not because the machines malfunctioned, but because poll workers didn't boot them up correctly.

One glitch occurred at a polling place on Sinclair Road. A voter was asked to come back at a later time because poll workers had problems trying to connect the new machines with a printer.

These were the type of spot problems that were experienced in Franklin County.

Matt Damschroder with the Franklin County Board of Elections addressed the difficulties with the new voting machines and says some voters were inconvenienced.

Apparently, printing has been the biggest problem, but election officials say the machines could have still been used, its just the poll workers didn't use it.
 
In Westerville, some voters complained that the local school levy didn't appear on the ballots of their touch-screen voting machines.
 
It happened in one polling place in which the precinct is split. They have both Columbus and Westerville voters and two different congressional districts.

The presiding judge thinks the poll workers improperly set the machine for some voters. There are 19 options to choose from and the ballot they get depends on which option is chosen.

They think in some cases, a voter was incorrectly identified as being 17 instead of over 18, which would have prevented them from voting on the school issue.
 
Presiding judge Jan Brittan says, "We think that whoever set the machine at that time must have chosen a 17-year-old instead of 18-year-old option and then neither the voter nor the poll worker nor the voter noticed it when we when we pushed the second screen that you saw when we chose one."

In those cases where the school issue didn't appear, they cancelled the vote and told the voter to try to come back later in the day. It affected less than a dozen people and things are running normally now.