Unlike past elections, an initial wave of election results should pour in from across the state Tuesday night within 45 minutes after the polls close. But that doesn’t mean it will be time to call the race. “My expectation is we will be able to declare a winner on election night,” Secretary of State Jon Husted said yesterday during a briefing about Election Day and beyond.But he also projected that final, unofficial counts might not be finished until 3 a.m. the day after the election.
Yesterday also saw other developments in Ohio voting:
• Citing reports that voters who wanted to cast a ballot for Mitt Romney had their vote switched to President Barack Obama by electronic-voting machines, the Republican National Committee asked elections officials in Ohio and five other states to recalibrate all of the devices by Tuesday’s election.
• A Husted bulletin to county elections boards late Wednesday to change a method that had been improperly disqualifying potential absentee voters is inadequate, says the head of the voter-advocacy group that discovered the problem. Thousands more eligible Ohioans could be denied the right to vote, said Norman Robbins, research director for Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates.
• U.S. District Court Judge Susan Dlott denied a prisoners advocacy group’s attempt to win new rules protecting the voting rights of anyone arrested this weekend and detained through Tuesday. The national GOP’s chief legal counsel said the problems with voting devices in Ohio and elsewhere apparently include “miscalibration and hyper-sensitivity of the machines.”
Full Article: Problems pop up as Election Day draws near | The Columbus Dispatch.