More Fear Over Voting Machines

This story is clearly designed to get the leftist crowd in America twisting over the ridiculous notion that George Bush stole the 2004 election by rigging voting machines in Ohio. As I wrote a few days ago, the electronic voting machine is the left’s new Chupacabra and Yeti rolled into one.

This story reports on problems experienced in Cuyahoga County’s recent primary in which not everything worked right. It is clear that they are implying that the voting machines were to blame, but a careful reading of the story shows that human error and lack of training were the sole causes of the problems.

From the AP here:

Problems with elections in Ohio’s most populous county are so severe that it’s unlikely they can be completely fixed by November, or even by the 2008 presidential election, a report commissioned by Cuyahoga County and released Tuesday says.

A nonprofit group hired to review the county’s first election with new electronic voting machines found several problems with the May 2 primary, the results of which were delayed six days because roughly 18,000 absentee ballots had to be hand counted.

The absentee ballots had been improperly formatted for new optical scan voting machines. Poll workers also had problems operating the machines, some poll workers didn’t show up, vote memory cards disappeared and one precinct opened hours late. Researchers also found that the four sources used to keep track of vote totals on machines did not always add up.

An official with the maker of the voting machines, North Canton-based Diebold Inc., said the report was flawed because the researchers did not properly review electronic votes in some cases.

Mark Radke, director of marketing for Diebold subsidiary Diebold Election Systems, also blamed inadequately trained poll workers, saying the totals didn’t always add up because some changed memory cards without also changing the paper receipt rolls.

If you have idiot poll workers who are not trained to work on the electronic voting machines, then yeah, you should expect some failures. But this was not a problem with the technology at all. Every glitch mentioned was due to human error. And the lead paragraph that suggests that these minor stupid errors are not likely to be fixed before the next Presidential election is pure pandering to the left. Nothing in this story suggests that these problems are insurmountable.