Ohio, High In The Middle and Fucked On Both Ends

This report by Adam Liptak in the New York Times on the Ohio vote is frustrating for many reasons:

The state relies heavily on punch-card balloting machines of the hanging-chad variety. Voting machines in Ohio failed to register votes for president in 92,000 cases over all this year, a number that includes failure to cast a vote, disallowed double votes and possible counting errors. An electronic voting machine added 3,893 votes to President Bush's tally in a suburban Columbus precinct that has only 800 voters.

Officials in Ohio will be able to reject some of the approximately 155,000 provisional ballots cast there, offered to potential voters whose names could not be located on local election rolls, because of the ambiguity of the standards.

There were also long lines at the polls, and it is unclear how many people grew too dispirited to keep waiting and ended up not voting.

One reason the report is frustrating is that it's nearly unintelligble.

How many of the 92,000 non-votes are failures to vote, how many are double votes and how many are possible counting errors? What does "possible counting errors" mean? And what does "over all this year" mean? Is Liptak referring to the primaries?

What does Liptak mean when he says that an electronic voting machine added 3,893 votes? What was the alleged malfunction -- how did it happen and what investigation has been done to confirm the same thing didn't happen elsewhere?

What is the "the ambiguity in the standards" which will allow provisional ballots to be rejected? And how many of the provisional ballots are subject to challenge in that manner? The article suggests none of these ballots have been counted yet, so how does he know that some of the ballots will be subject to challenge based on the unexplained ambiguity?

Liptak's report raises all of these questions, and explains none of them.

The other reason the report is frustrating is that neither Liptak nor his employer, the Times, appear to take the matter seriously, as evidenced by the half-assed nature of the report. And if the Times is doing nothing, who is doing anything about this?