Battlegrounders
[ home | archives | email ]

OHIO: LAWSUITS & LONG LINES III [Kevin Holtsberry 11/02 10:52 PM]

Ok, I am sorry about the lack of clarity on some of this but, I now think that paper ballots are being handed out in Franklin and Knox Counties. News accounts had voters waiting for hours in order to cast their vote, but I am still not clear if a system is being implemented consistently that will result in polls being fully closed any time soon.

Interesting twist on this issue: punch card ballots have higher error rate than other forms of voting. If Democrats had succeeded in getting polling places to use punch cards then they might have legal avenues available to them later to claim that minorities were disadvantaged by the system. If Kerry appears to lose Ohio, you can count on the race card being played hard and fast. This issue might have been avoided by the use of paper ballots marked with a pencil. This avoids the infamous hanging chad but means longer counting as they can't me tallied with a computer.

It still looks like we won't know a result in Ohio for sometime as either the long lines will mean delayed counts or the paper ballots will take longer to count. And of course if the potential provisional ballots are greater than the margin of victory, we could be talking days before we know.

I am now going to leave this issue to the lawyers . . .