This morning, relatively deep within a Columbus Dispatch article titled Pryce’s lead over Kilroy grows with 2 counties’ totals lies a item more newsworthy than the lead I think:
But [Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matthew] Damschroder said one post-election discovery will add to Monday's official tally.
Votes from about 30 electronic machines in 12 county precincts weren't counted on election-night, he said, because poll workers didn't shut them down properly.
That would add another 1,800 or more votes countywide — and an unknown smaller number in the Pryce-Kilroy race — if those machines matched the average number of votes cast per machine across Franklin County.
More...
The absentee and provisional ballots in Franklin County, by far the lion's share of the untallied votes for OH-15, remain to be announced. They are currently being counted with no intermediate results planned to be released. The provisionals will be concentrated in Kilroy strongholds in Franklin County, in contrast to the rural counties (Madison and Union) that have barely added to Pryce's lead. In fact, even in those rural counties where Pryce enjoyed a 2:1 margin overall, Pryce picked up fewer provisional votes than expected, showing that even in deep red country the provisionals skew to the Democratic side. Stay tuned.
But 30 voting machines show up unaccounted for at this date? That's news.
Seems like a good system would have flagged an outage like that on the day after the election. On the other side of conspiracy street, errant ballot boxes showing up at the last minute recall the specter of Ballot Box 13 in LBJ's 1948 Senate race.
Taking the initial cause of the snafu at face value--that the poll workers mishandled the end-of-day data dump--isn't too much of a stretch. I was a poll oberver at a Franklin County polling place on Nov. 7 and watched those procedures pretty closely. This was at the end of a very long day that started around 5:30am, so there was definitely a feeling of "get it done and let's get out of here" at 7:30pm when the polls closed. The workers were taking friendly bets on whether they'd be done by 8:00. No such chance--the process was a little time-consuming. It was pushing 9pm by the time shop closed up.
Basically the presiding poll judge took a master smart card device of some sort, called a master PEB, and placed it in each machine's front slot (ES&S iVotronic DREs were used uniformly across the country). Then she went through the touch-screen menu to read the machine's votes into the PEB, followed by some kind of machine audit process (please wait........). The reading in of data from the machine was not a fast process, and the audit took several minutes (it seemed anyway), during which time admonitions flashed on the screen to not remove the PEB. These warnings were pretty visible particularly with the flashing text, so that part was good at least. These poll workers did everything by the book as far as I could tell and went through the six machines at this polling place without any visible glitch.
I verified that the individual machine totals matched the overall reported total (the poll workers did not do this BTW) and everything looked kosher. But I suppose some poll workers across the over 500 polling places across the county may have screwed up transfering data to the PEB. If this is what happened, there ought to be a better process to collect and audit the data on the spot and flag this type of situation. Simply going through the final printout to see that each machine's votes were subtotaled would prevent the skipping of a machine--if that's what in fact happened. We shall see how the explanation ultimately plays out, & whether there might be something fouler afoot.
P.S.
I said there was no glitch observed at the polling place I was at. Well, there was one thing that could be called a glitch. The result of each audit was printed on the paper trail device as the machine shut down. I was looking at these results just as a precaution. As the workers went down the line of machines I looked at the last one they did and there were no audit results printed. In fact, there was just a message "printer operation restored." When I asked the workers, who had already moved on to the next machine, why the audit result wasn't printed, they just tried to say that somehow it doesn't matter, that the screen confirmed the data was read. They didn't seem to be concerned at all that there was at the very least a problem with this machine, that the printer in fact had not been working all day. When I said that the paper trail is very important for recount purposes, they looked at me like I was speaking Greek. Either they were playing dumb (in order to get the hell out of there) or more likely they just paid little or no attention to the printers in any event. In this case, the printer on the machine in question had jammed in the morning and was replaced by a technician and the machine was placed back in service at 10:30am. However, no one had noticed throughout the day that the printer on this machine was in fact not working and was just displaying "printer operation restored." Voters didn't notice it, the poll workers didn't notice it and I didn't notice it till the end. Pity the lowly voter verified paper trail.