From The Washington Times, Inside Politics column, dated: Friday, January 21,2005 (no link provided as that column content changes daily), there's this blurb of important information regarding Ohio and their voting problems....
Under the heading Sore Loser, a column that takes John Kerry to task for his vote against Condoleezza Rice, his demands that Pres. Bush fire Defense Sec'ty Rumsfeld, and more, there's a quote and more information about voting in Ohio.
The quote:
... And of course there's his 'I have a bellyache' speech in which he complained that there weren't enough voting machines in Ohio Democratic precincts,"...
"Like Kerry's Vietnam-era 'war crimes' calumnies, that last complaint would appear to be a canard, as the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports: 'A Plain Dealer analysis shows that, in { Ohio's } Cuyahoga County at least, the elections board distributed machines equally to city and suburban polling locations...
" 'Before the Nov. 2 election, the elections board alloted each Cleveland precinct one machine for every 117 registered voters within its boundarie -- the same ratio of machines that suburban precincts received...
" 'And in the end, the busiest precincts -- when measured by the number of ballots cast per machine -- were actually in the suburbs, not Cleveland, according to a Plain Dealer analysis of records from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.' "
Say what?!? The number of machines were equally distributed between suburbs and urban areas? It was based on 117 voters per machine? Then how the hell, and/or why the hell could voters in the Cleveland area not seem to be able to make it to the polls without a bunch of whining and crying among Democrats that it took "many hours" of waiting in lines to vote? And why the hell weren't voters there able to cast their votes without Democrats crying about people being "dis-enfranchised"??!?
117 voters per machine is pretty damned reasonable. Simple math, hmmm, not my strong point, but here goes. 10 minutes (on average) to vote per voter. 117 voters, multiplied by 10 minutes. (darn, some voters are probably slow, but oh well). That comes to 1170 minutes of voting time supposedly required on a machine. Divide that by 60 minutes to come back down into hours (a number more people probably recognize), and you find that supposedly 19.5 hours would be needed to get 117 votes cast. But of course, that assumes that people could find the "anybody but that damned Pres. Bush" line/button/space in 10 minutes time. Not that it should have taken that long for most voters, but still...
I would personally think that a voter that has their vision so clouded over in hatred of the incumbent could figure out in a very short period of time where the line/dot/button is for the other candidate, and they'd get their vote done quick, fast, and in a hurry. Even allowing for time to verify the vote, 5 - 6 minutes should be plenty of time. That math works down to 117 x 6, 702 minutes, 11.7 hours total.
Somewhere between that 10 minutes, and that 6 minutes (on the low end), there's a number that would seem about right for how much time it would take a voter to register a vote.
Either way, it seems clear to me -- by these numbers -- that the problem wasn't the number of machines, but instead was a problem with a number of the voters. Voters that couldn't seem to get through the lines to access the machines, or some other such problem. Voters that were too slow in registering their votes for John Kerry, etc.
Anyway, I sincerely hope that next time, somehow, we can find one machine per voter, just so we can eliminate these problems and not hear the whining after."
