Elections System Switches Could Cost Taxpayers $40M (Cleveland)

[OhioChick]

POSTED: 5:35 pm EST February 27, 2008
UPDATED: 6:25 pm EST February 27, 2008

CLEVELAND -- After years of miscues and mistakes, Cuyahoga County election officials are confident they will pull off a clean election this time.

But to fix the mistakes, taxpayers are going to pay tens of millions of dollars, reported chief investigator Duane Pohlman.

The mistakes were made years ago when Cuyahoga County rushed to buy electronic voting machines, and the county never got a warranty, reported Pohlman.

Taxpayers are now paying not only for the old electronic machines, but possibly two new systems.

Two years of fiascos and frustrations forced the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections and Ohio's secretary of state to scrap the Diebold TSX machines now sitting in boxes, which cost $22 million.

Diebold reports that the county hasn't requested a refund.

http://www.newsnet5.com/news/15429715/detail.html

[margotb822]

1. Better that than a rigged election!

:argh:

[bemildred]

2. Cheap at any price, how much did Bush cost us? nt

[bean fidhleir]

3. The officials who did it should be charged with fiduciary failure and sued

to recover the costs. It's not as though it would have been hard to do their job correctly. They had the entire power of the state at their disposal.

[EFerrari]

4. I've noticed that whenever a venue decides to change out these POS

there is a lot of negative PR -- warnings of expense and delay. That happened here, too, when Debra decertified some of the worst systems.

It never seems to work the other way around. You don't read stories warning you about these machines before they are installed. I bet that the vendors seed this stuff in the media.