...when two lengthy reports examining Cuyahoga County's election procedures uncovered multiple serious problems (the county lost 812 voter-access cards that allow a voter to cast a ballot on machines; it also lost 313 keys to the memory-card compartments where votes are stored on machines and hired taxi drivers to drive to election precincts and pick up the memory cards that contained the votes).

Then in 2007, two election officials in Cuyahoga County were convicted of rigging a recount in the 2004 presidential election by cherry-picking ballots to recount that they knew would match the official count rather than randomly picking ballots.

Now we have a mystery involving touch-screen voting machines used in Franklin County, Ohio, that has launched a criminal investigation to determine why a message that some voters saw on their touch-screen machines didn't appear on other machines.

The issue has raised a number of questions about when the electronic ballot on the machines was programmed and by whom. A preliminary investigation has also uncovered a couple of additional surprises about the machines -- it turns out that not only did the county fail to conduct mandatory tests on the machines before the November election, but a county programmer had also intentionally disabled an internal auditing function for logging any changes made to the machine software, possibly thwarting investigators' ability to determine what occurred with the ballots and who was responsible. The programmer says the voting machine company advised him to disable the log to speed up the programming process.

The machines in question are made by Election Systems and Software, the largest voting machine company in the country, which is based in Omaha, Nebraska.

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