Election results were held up for six days in Cuyahoga County last May, testing the patience of voters and damaging their confidence. Ohio's most populous county will hold its second election in November using touch-screen voting machines made by North Canton-based Diebold Inc. The first attempt at electronic voting during the May primary was marred by problems, including poll workers who were not prepared to operate the machines and memory cards that were misplaced or lost. Vote counts were delayed six days when roughly 18,000 improperly printed absentee ballots had to be hand-counted because they couldn't be scanned by Diebold's optical scan machines. The county...isn't alone nationally. In Cook County, Ill., results were delayed a week because of mechanical and human failures connected to new voting machines. At a recent meeting, where a kitchen timer ticks off each speaker's allotted five minutes during the public comment period, voter Daniel Kozminski of Solon questioned the integrity of Diebold's machines, citing various reports. He also scoffed at the board's refusal to post results from individual precincts on the Web to help verify vote totals. Diebold has defended its machines from several disparaging studies, including one by a Princeton University computer science professor which claims the company's machines are vulnerable to hacking. On the net - Black Box Voting: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
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