Elections can be messy things. And, by elections, we don’t mean campaigns – those are worse than messy; they are legalized madness. What we mean is the actual organizing of an election, the running of polling places and the process of counting the votes. Local boards of elections, for the most part, do a superb job of pulling them off. But we have been covering politics and elections for over 40 years; and can’t remember a single one where something didn’t go wrong on Election Day – either by human error or technology failure or both. On Nov. 5, in Hamilton County, a whole lot of things went wrong when the Hamilton County Board of Elections became the largest county in Ohio to adopt the use of electronic poll books. While the vast majority of Hamilton County voters – about 198,000 people – went to their polling places and voted with no problems whatsoever, that was not the case for several thousand others, who encountered problems of poll workers who did not seem to be well-trained on
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