Ohiocore

A sampling of Ohio, from all over the news:

New York Times: "Voting Problems in Ohio Set Off an Alarm":

• "Officials in Ohio will be able to reject some of the approximately 155,000 provisional ballots cast there..."


• "Voting machines in Ohio failed to register votes for president in 92,000 cases over all this year,"


• Ken Blackwell's expected voter turnout: 72%. Reported turnout: 70%.


• "In Ohio, for instance, four-member county election boards, each with two Republicans and two Democrats, will decide [whether to count provisional ballots], with the approval of three members needed to count the votes."

That last one is among the most distressing, since purely partisan considerations can easily allow the invalidation of all provisional ballots. Legally, if your party doesn't want to count them, they can prevent it. And why should it be that the NYTimes is the first to bring it to my attention when I've been reading the Columbus Dispatch and Cleveland Plain Dealer regularly?

Also check the Washington Post, with the specificity:

"The vote counting was marred in several places by computer glitches. the most serious appears to be in Ohio, which provided Bush with his decisive margin. Election officials in Franklin County, in the Columbus area, said yesterday that a computer error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in one precinct."