I want to document my voting experience yesterday at the Middlebury Twp. precinct in Knox County, Ohio. When I cast my vote on a touch-screen machine for Zack Space, the machine registered Joy Padgett. When I changed it, it flipped back to Padgett, twice. Finally, it stayed on Space, but when I turned the page to review my votes, the machine once again registered Joy Padgett.

I was equally troubled by the response of the poll workers to whom I reported the glitch. Their response was something like, "Don't worry about it, it will be all right." They didn't close down the machine!

I checked the print-out to make sure the results were recorded correctly. I left wondering how many voters would even notice the glitch and check the print-out.

Isn't it interesting that all of these glitches seem to err in favor of Republicans?

Jacqueline I. Ruhl
Fredericktown, Ohio

We are holding our parallel election at Whetstone Recreation Center, 3923 N. High Street, Columbus (Franklin Co.) Ohio. Franklin County uses ES&S iVotronic touch screen DRE machines. We've been rained on all morning.

By 10AM, there were over 200 parallel voters.

This polling site accommodates four precincts: 19C, 19D, 20A, and 20D totaling over 3,400 registered voters. I obtained the serial numbers for all the machines, and the names of each Presiding Judge.

19C – 901 registered voters and 5 machines;
19D – 1097 reg. voters and 6 machines;
20A – 533 reg. voters and 3 machines;
20D – 897 reg. voters and 5 machines
(Total: 3,428 voters on 19 machines)

National media arrived a little after 9 AM, interviewing folks inside, as well as our PE workers. Marj Creech gave a TV interview to CNBC. CBS also covered us. Info they provided includes Franklin County's forecast that there will be 106,000 absentee voters and about 200,000 in-person voters.

This is the first parallel election where we brought a printed list of registered voters. This allows us to help people determine their correct

Cuyahoga County is filing criminal charges against me because I asked some volunteers for the Vote Count Protection Project to call some of the Election Day Technicians, and ask them if they would be willing to write down some of the Voting Unit election results on a data-collection form, to used for vote-count verification purposes.

We were doing this because Blackwell’s directive on 11/1 said that we could not add any more “Observers” to the list of observers, so we could not get “inside access.”

We were doing this because Cuyahoga County was NOT going to post results for the public to see.

We were doing this because of Cuyahoga Board of Elections' dismal record of the May Election debacle, secrecy and law-breaking,, and, in general, 92% of the public distrusts electronic voting!

We were doing this because the proposed post-election “audit” being paid for by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections is a total SHAM! The audit will NOT be counting actual ballots, but sub-totals of ballot counts, and will not be counting all precincts, but a subset of the precincts. Their proposed “audit” is nothing of the sort!

GOP trashes exit polls & builds barricades as election day proceeds

Watch out for the stop sign when you go to vote today. Not the one on the street, the one in the pollbook next to your name.

The new voting requirements under Ohio's HB 3 may lead to unexpected upsets by the GOP in the ongoing election. The Republican Statehouse rushed through a bill earlier this year that is causing the "flagging" of up to 1.2 million Buckeye voters.

Free Press reporters have observed a "Stop Sign" icon next to the name of between 20-40% of the voters in inner city precincts in Columbus. The stop sign is outlined on page 50 of the Franklin County Board of Elections "Precinct Elections Training Manual." The stop sign is the result of a "60-day election notice" sent to voters, but being returned as "undeliverable." Voters with stop signs next to their names throughout the inner city are being allowed to vote provisionally at the poll. These votes are being electronically recorded as provisional, according to the Training Manual and many are likely to go uncounted because the voter is in the wrong precinct.

To the congressional winners of Campaign 2006: as you savor your victory and prepare to take office in January, consider this bit of free advice on how to make those tough decisions you’ll soon face on the war: pick a number. 

It’s simple.  Pick a number.  Any number.  It doesn’t much matter which number, as long as it’s greater than 47,615 – the number of U.S. troops killed and wounded so far in Iraq.  Now pick another number, something over 650,000 – the latest estimate of how many Iraqis have died in the war.  But, I suppose we should keep it simple, so let’s just stick to the only number that really matters politically, the one for U.S. casualties.

Got your number? 

OK.  That’s all there is to it.  That’s the only tough decision you’ll have to make on the war.