Tom Coyne used to be a politician. The former mayor of Brookpark, and member of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections from 1998 to 2004, is now a semi-retired talking head on Channel 19. A few days after returning from a recent Florida vacation, Coyne arrived at a suburban Starbucks to talk about his time on the elections board and decisions he helped make that continue to reverberate today.

Coyne is not in favor of the board's latest headline-making move, switching from one electronic voting system to another.

The controversial and much-maligned touch-screen system needs a chance to work; it's not going to go smoothly until a few more tries, Coyne says. "Why would you want to take a step 200 years backwards?" he asks, referring to the planned return to paper ballots. "What I understood was that it was my charge to get the board of elections into the 22nd century, to give staff the support systems they needed to implement elections." At the time paperless voting seemed to make a lot of sense.

Several minutes into the interview, Coyne is interrupted by his ringing cell phone. It's his wife. He answers the call, then turns back around. He waves a sleek, razor-thin model in his right hand and says, "This is how you're going to vote someday."

That may be, but the comment also goes a long way toward explaining recent history and why the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections has sent $20 million worth of Diebold touch-screen voting machines off for indefinite storage, and why it's now scrambling to replace them with an optical scan system, an entirely different type of electronic voting.

In some ways it's a classic government story, with consultants and contractors jockeying to win lucrative contracts, sometimes using political connections to do so. But as Coyne's cell-phone voting prediction indicates, it's also about the dazzle of slick new technologies and the near-giddiness they inspired in a county long plagued by embarrassing election day failures.

In 1972, during a presidential primary, the county elections board failed to deliver voting equipment to polling locations in time. Sixteen precincts never opened. A court order extended voting for hours, and in some cases, an entire day.

In November 1992, thousands of punch-card ballots remained uncounted for weeks; staffing issues had relegated board employees to answering registration questions rather than tabulation. Congressman Louis Stokes, the benefactor of many patronage positions at the elections board, was seen walking freely around the ballot tabulation room, even as results from his own reelection bid were being counted.

And these are just two of the higher-profile gaffes that many still remembered in 1998, when Coyne and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert Bennett joined the board. John Hairston, a Democrat who worked at NASA Glenn, also came on at the same time, but left in 2001. Roger Synenberg, a criminal defense attorney and longtime Republican active in the county party, had been on the board since 1989.

It had been 20 years since Cuyahoga County last upgraded its voting systems, from lever machines to punch cards. There hadn't been serious mechanical problems, but the board of election's expenses consistently outpaced its $10 million annual budget. New voting technology - and touch screens in particular - offered the best chance to save money in the long term, Bennett says in an interview.

Both touch screens and optical scanners are electronic voting systems. Optical scanners require voters to fill in ovals on paper ballots which are fed into scanners. Counties can provide scanners at each precinct, so that voters can find out immediately if they've inadvertently filled in too many ovals (overvoting) or too few (undervoting); such mistakes can cause entire ballots to be tossed out. Or counties can use scanners only for tabulation, at central locations. (The switch underway for next week's primary is to central-scan technology.)

But printing, distributing and storing ballots is labor-intensive, expensive and ripe for error. (In the 2000 Republican presidential primary, the board drastically underestimated voter turnout and ran out of Republican ballots.) Hence the appeal of touch screens. Votes are cast on a computer and stored on removable memory cards.

Federal and Ohio laws require that all paper ballots for federal races be saved for 22 months. "In this county, for the 2004 presidential election, that would have meant two million pieces of paper," Bennett says, still incredulous at the thought. "Just looking at the storage costs alone would have been tremendous."

So the prospect of paperless elections was too enticing.

But what about recounts in close races? Initially board members were satisfied that electronically voted ballots could later be printed off each machine, failing to understand that the system just reproduces an internal vote log - hardly an independent check.

Still, Coyne says of the board's early examination of touch-screen systems, "We thought [in 1998] that that was the most progressive way. We wanted to make a decision going forward." In separate interviews, Synenberg and Bennett echo Coyne. (Ed Coaxum, a labor lawyer who served on the board from 2001 to 2006, declined repeated requests for an interview.)

The board prepared to vet the new technology and set up its case for touch screens. This project began in earnest in 1998, just as Coyne and Bennett took their board seats. An internal electronic voting team was created, led by then-elections coordinator Gwen Dillingham. A consultant was also hired, for $150,000. A touch-screen device was introduced at the county fair that year, and again in 1999. The board also allowed touch-screen vendors to use their products in real municipal elections, as test runs to gauge public acceptance.

Most of the major contenders brought their wares to Cuyahoga County. Global Elections Systems (later bought by Diebold, and now renamed Premier Elections Systems) was allowed to deploy a touch-screen system, as were Sequoia Voting Systems, Hart InterCivic and Elections Systems & Software (ES&S).

An early start meant that Cuyahoga County, among the largest counties in the nation, could not only get the best deal on touch screens, say board members, but also set an example for other counties nationwide.

The test runs seem to have gone flawlessly.

Coyne was then mayor of Brookpark, a working-class town built by World War II veterans taking advantage of the GI Bill, many of whom worked at the Ford plant. These were people who didn't like change, Coyne says of his constituents. "So I said, let's test these things in Brookpark."

As voters walked into polling locations, they were given a choice: Vote on the old punch-card device or a touch-screen machine. In this way, the board gained input on equipment from the various manufacturers. "The voters overwhelmingly liked the electronic voting system," Coyne says. "They really liked it."

It's important to note, however, that these elections were small, and vendors from the various companies swarmed around the polling places like ants, answering questions and dealing with problems. It was nothing like a real election, in which minimum-wage poll workers would be doing the trouble-shooting. And with no optical scan systems deployed in these test elections, the touch-screen surveys amounted to a public relations coup - getting people to accept them without ever even mentioning alternatives.

The Cuyahoga County commissioners, who control the board of election's purse strings, were proving a harder sell. They weren't buying the argument of long-term savings and, during the late '90s, showed little interest in financing an elaborate new voting system. But in November 2000, the elections nightmare in Florida made "hanging chad" a household phrase and snapped the country into the realization that all was not well with its election processes.

In 2001, Bob Ney, then a US Congressman from Ohio, introduced the Help America Vote Act. The bill's main goal was to dispense billions in federal aid to replace outdated voting technology with equipment that informed voters of overvotes and undervotes (which, studies showed, happened more often in minority and low-income communities).

By the end of 2001, almost 20 percent of the nation's electorate was already using touch screens or optical scan systems. If passed, the Help America Vote Act would pump another $4 billion into this growing market. Manufacturers swooned at the potential windfall and scrambled to land contracts.

It's hard to say who was more excited to bring the technology here, the Cuyahoga elections board members - Coyne announced his hopes to install touch screens by November 2003 - or the companies selling the machines.

"Electronic is where we're going, Internet is where we're going," Coyne says when asked why the board pursued touch screens without fully considering optical scans. "Neither one of them is perfect. It's always been my experience, when you have the funding there for you to go forward beyond today, beyond five years from today, that is the best path to choose."

Throughout 2002, HAVA climbed through Congress, and the Cuyahoga County board churned out even more cost comparisons touting the advantages of touch screens over optical-scan systems (the latter was only considered for absentee voting). Ohio was scheduled to receive $130 million, which would be disbursed to the state's 88 counties based on voter registration figures.

Diebold, a Canton-based ATM manufacturer worth nearly $2 billion, wanted in on this market but didn't have time to develop its own line of products. So in January 2002, Diebold paid $25 million to acquire Global Elections Systems, which had already sold 26,000 touch screen machines to Maryland and Georgia.

With many millions of dollars at stake, it was inevitable that political influence - or at least the appearance of it - would become a factor.

In the summer of '02, the Cuyahoga board signed a $14,000 contract with a consultant, the Project Group, to help write up bid requests for electronic voting machine vendors. As documented by the Plain Dealer's Mark Naymik, that immediately injected politics into the county's decision. The Project Group's founder, John Zayac, was a former member of, and consultant to, Cleveland City Council. He was also close friends with Coyne, who had a financial stake in Zayac's company: Coyne was paid $750 a month as a business development consultant.

When the Project Group finished, Diebold emerged as a top contender, Coyne says. But board members concluded that one more round of consulting was required, this time to help with final vendor selection, purchase of machines and voter education. In December '02, a $350,000 contract was advertised.

The Project Group was one of six companies to bid, sending the board into months of political infighting. In the end, no one was hired.

Meanwhile, Dillingham's internal electronic voting team wasn't amounting to much. Four PowerPoint reports, one each on Diebold, Sequoia, Hart and ES&S touch-screen systems, apparently written in 2003, were ad hoc at best; they seemed subjective and based on the anonymous reviewers' perceptions alone, with no consistent benchmarks.

Furthermore, neither Dillingham's team nor the board's outside consultants ever seem to have learned that the Global touch-screen system Diebold had acquired was originally designed to sit unattended in shopping malls, according to Doug Jones, a University of Iowa computer science professor. But there had been virtually no demand for such a device, so Global had made little effort to upgrade it. Security, for example, was not part of the basic design and had yet to be tacked on.

As Cuyahoga COunty tried to research its options, the major industry players - Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S and Hart - bombarded politicians and elections officials with marketing and other methods of persuasion.

In Ohio, the vendors hired well-known figures, especially those with connections to Cuyahoga County's elections board members.

Democrat Anthony Celebrezze Jr., a former Ohio attorney general and secretary of state, joined forces with Diebold. (By 2003, Celebrezze formed a consulting firm, the ACG Group, with Democrat Juan Andrade and Republican Pat Gallina. Celebrezze died soon after the venture opened, leaving Ohio to Gallina. Gallina had once been quite active in Cuyahoga County Republican politics. He'd managed former Cleveland Republican Mayor Ralph Perk's 1972 campaign, during which he worked closely with Bob Bennett, a rising star in the Republican Party's executive branch.)

Jonathan Hughes, a registered lobbyist, also worked for Diebold. Jonathan is the son of Robert Hughes, the legendary chairman of Cuyahoga County's Republican Party, a post he held for 23 years until retiring in 1991. It was the elder Hughes who recommended Roger Synenberg to the board of elections seat in 1989.

Hart employed Patrick Sweeney, a former Democratic Ohio House majority leader, and Anthony Sinagra, a former Republican state senator and Lakewood mayor.

(County commissioners, who would eventually fund additional machines, also received attention. Most notably, Gallina donated a total of $3,000 between 2002 and 2005 to Democrat Jimmy Dimora.)

And Diebold continued to consolidate its elections division (the company was anticipating a 25-percent increase in voting equipment sales). In early 2003 the company bought one of the largest voter-registration system makers for $6 million. But by June, sales figures were down 80 percent from the year before - nearly $34 million in electronic voting equipment revenues had dwindled to a meager $8 million. Voting contracts with states and counties were taking too long to complete (Cuyahoga County, for example, was reeling from confusing directives and constraining master contracts coming out of the secretary of state's office), and slow shipments were affecting timely payments.

A lot of money had been spent on the promise of huge returns but Diebold hadn't bet on the slowness of the political process. Then the negative publicity began to mount.

In 2003, Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, figured out that the encryption software on Diebold's touch-screen machines was a discredited 1998 version. Rubin also had discovered that Diebold had given the same administrative password to all their machines: 1-1-1-1. This was national news.

Suddenly those opposed to touch-screen technology could not easily be dismissed as conspiracy theorists. Many states backed off impending purchases. Others, including Ohio, set out to conduct further tests.

Within days of Rubin's report, Diebold sent e-mails - with a 27-page rebuttal attached - to local boards of elections members and staff. The one to Cuyahoga County stated that company representatives were available to answer any questions or concerns. Bennett says the board instructed then-Executive Director Michael Vu to contact states already using the Diebold touch screens.

A consultant named Brit Williams, who'd been instrumental in helping Georgia buy $56 million worth of Diebold touch screens, condemned the Hopkins report and demanded an apology. He also told the Virginia State Board of Elections to give Diebold touch screens the green light.

Then the assistant director of elections for Georgia was quoted in Diebold materials as saying, "I was disappointed in the [Hopkins] report because the way they tested the system is completely out of context with how the system is used."

So what Vu heard from other officials hardly contradicted the Cuyahoga board's leanings toward Diebold touch screens.

"You had people coming up that were doing all kinds of studies," Bennett says. "Everybody else was saying these [Diebold touch screens] were no good." Bennett says he put his faith in poll workers and other election officials and the election-day process.

"You also had to look at the checks and balance system in Ohio. If somebody dragged in a 40-pound magnet into a polling location [to disrupt touch screen units] they ought to be stopped by somebody before they can get that close to the machine."

(But he now admits that training to assure tight-knit election-day procedures was lacking. He blames Diebold. "I do not believe the manufacturer gave the full value for the training contract.")

By the end of 2003, it was no longer a few scientists warning about the dangers of touch-screen systems; it was state governments as well. Maryland released its own findings, as did Ohio. These studies found glaring gaps in Ohio counties' election-day administration procedures and with vendors' security measures. California began to decertify Diebold touch-screen machines.

Bennett says the board questioned the company every time. "We publicly asked representatives of Diebold to address the issues," he says. "And in many cases they did." Bennett says Vu's executive office was tasked with the responsibility of sifting through the various reports. Vu, now working as the assistant registrar of voters in San Diego County, did not reply to requests for an interview.

It does seem that Vu might have been trying to hedge bets against Diebold. His e-mail correspondence indicates that he was in talks with Hart InterCivic until Feb. 12, 2004.

But suddenly Diebold sweetened the deal.

On Feb. 25, 2004, Vu wrote a county commissioner that Diebold had offered the Cuyahoga board a brand-new voter-registration system, free of charge. The next day, Coyne led the other board members in a unanimous vote to select Diebold touch screens for Cuyahoga County. Though no contracts were signed, the Cuyahoga board's choice was now official. Once Diebold finished retrofitting its machines with printers (to satisfy demands for a paper trail for recounts), the company would get the $15 million federal dollars destined for Cuyahoga County. After the county completed a separate contract for additional machines and equipment, Diebold would get another $5 million from county coffers.

To voting rights activists, however, the matter was far from settled.

Petite with short black hair, Vicki Lovegren is a computer-science professor at Case Western Reserve University. Adele Eisner, a tall, lanky massage therapist, has curly gray hair that defies attempts to rein it in. Both started attending elections board meetings in 2004.

The two were staunch advocates of the paper trail. In their ideal world, elections meant hand-counted paper ballots - no technology whatsoever. They understood that this wasn't possible, so they urged Bennett and his board to consider optical scanners.

By this time Coyne had been replaced on the board by Loree Soggs, a Democratic labor union contract negotiator, and Synenberg by Sally Florkiewicz, a co-chair of the county Republican party. Neither had much technical expertise or, they say, information about how the original decision had been made, and so deferred to Ed Coaxum and Bennett on matters pertaining to touch-screen technology.

By the time Lovegren and Eisner came on the scene, Bennett was way past even considering optical scanners.

At board meeting after meeting, Bennett and Vu tried to persuade Lovegren and Eisner that touch screens were the best solution. Touch screens, they argued, provided immediate voting error notification, could assist the blind with audio options, and ballots in Spanish were just a click away. The voter-verified paper trail that Diebold had so graciously added would provide the last chapter in voter confidence.

Lovegren and Eisner's concerns, however, lay elsewhere. They wanted to know why, given the rising tide of concern over touch-screen voting, the board continued talks with Diebold. These were black boxes, they argued, with a secret software code that could do anything at any time despite millions spent on testing.

At a July 2005 board meeting, Lovegren demanded documentation. "Who did you talk to in the way of non-vendors of voting equipment?" she asked. "Did you talk to computer scientists who are not in the electronic voting [business]? Because I would like to get their names, because I don't think you have done due diligence."

Specifically, Lovegren wanted evidence of comparisons between optical-scan and touch-screen systems. Of course, no such thing existed because it had never been done.

Bennett tried his best to assure Lovegren and protect the board's decision. "What we did to arrive at this point is we tested almost every available system that was on the market." He meant all available touch screens, but didn't say as much.

Lovegren, who'd been politicized by the war in Iraq, launched into a diatribe.

"I was in Iraq before the war," Lovegren said. "And I promised them I would do everything I could to stop the war. And I couldn't stop it. And I will do everything because I promised them that we have elected people that are rulers, because unelected rulers in this country make huge mistakes, like this war. ..."

Bennett's eyes glossed over. As chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, Bennett wasn't about to spar over the legitimacy of George Bush's presidency.

Today, Bennett says he tried to be open-minded.

"I think the initial attitude was that the activists were serving a purpose," he says, "that they were raising questions we hadn't thought of. They were raising concerns that were maybe out there among the voters. I think we really tried to address their questions. Then it became intense and very time-consuming at the meetings."

Bennett says he grew weary of the conspiracy theories, such as how he and then-Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell had calculated Bush's Ohio win. He would tune out Lovegren until she finished. On one occasion he told her, "Democracy is great, Mrs. Lovegren. You have the ability to talk."

The activists were wasting their breath - as far as the board was concerned, there was no turning back. Not even when the secretary of state's office declared, in January 2005, that Diebold's touch-screen machines did not meet its standards for providing a paper trail.

Contract negotiations with Diebold were nearly complete, but now Secretary of State Blackwell wanted Cuyahoga County to choose from two different optical-scan technologies. Bennett wasn't about to let that happen.

In February 2005, Bennett pounded his gavel and brought the meeting to order. The optical-scan system did provide a paper trail, Bennett agreed, but Diebold had retrofitted a printer onto its touch-screen machines so voters could verify their votes before leaving the polls. This might not meet the secretary of state's expectations, but it met California's and Nevada's and therefore his own, Bennett said. Diebold had "stepped up to the plate." How dare the secretary of state interfere so late in the game.

He looked over at Gwen Dillingham, who'd led the internal electronic voting team, and asked, "We have tested these earlier on?"

"We never tested optical scanners," Dillingham replied.

That meant that without further investigation, the board couldn't do "due diligence to make sure we're getting the very best for the people of Cuyahoga County," Bennett said. He then passed on the county's last chance to carry out such an inquiry and to even consider optical scanning alongside the coveted touch screens.

"I think [optical scan] is a mistake for this county to go into future elections with unknown costs, tremendous costs that are going to be placed on this county when there is a better system out there, and all we need is a little bit of time to straighten out," Bennett said. A unanimous board voted to defy the secretary of state's order for optical-scan systems.

On Nov. 11, 2005, the Cuyahoga board signed the contract to purchase 5,500 Diebold touch-screen machines with HAVA money. Within two weeks, Director Michael Vu was no longer sure if the touch screens could handle Cuyahoga County's complex needs.

In a memo to Diebold, Vu wrote that he was alarmed by a number of problems that had come to his attention. It didn't seem as though Diebold's touch screens could accommodate the county's multiple ballot styles. Some on-screen buttons weren't being activated when touched. It was too easy for an administrator to erase election results off memory cards, accidentally or otherwise. Communications with other Ohio counties that had used Diebold's touch screens for the Nov. 8, 2005 election had revealed a host of problems with the attached paper trail; there had been numerous paper jams and improper installations.

Even the integrity of the thermal paper (like the paper used in old fax machines) was uncertain. "There is a concern that the paper trail will not last long enough," Vu wrote. (The paper record for state elections must be saved for 60 days; all federal races must be preserved for 22 months.)

Had Diebold conducted adequate tests? Vu asked. Had the company determined whether the paper could withstand a manual recount after 22 months? What about fading ink? What environment did Diebold recommend for paper-trail storage?

Of course, all of these questions should have been asked at least nine months earlier, in February 2005, when Bennett easily accepted Diebold's claims about the hastily attached printers. At that meeting, Bennett's overarching concerns were that contract negotiations with Diebold were almost 95 percent complete and that touch screens' cost savings were sizeable. He'd confidently informed Vicki Lovegren, in response to yet another question about optical scan, "Mrs. Lovegren, we are not going back to paper ballots."

The first time Diebold's touch screens went live in Cuyahoga County, in May 2006, 75 memory cards went missing. The free voter registration software thrown in by Diebold didn't do its job, in part because training had been insufficient.

An audit of the November 2006 election revealed that many of the security procedures touted by vendors and board members as safeguards against fraud had not been followed.

In March 2007, high-speed card readers made the server crash. Then in November 2007, the main Diebold tabulation server crashed twice on election night. Nearly 20% of the paper-trail printers jammed.

In December, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner cast the tie-breaking vote that sent the current Cuyahoga County Board of Elections scrambling to implement an optical-scan system. The Diebold touch-screen machines now collect dust in a warehouse in Sheffield Village, all $20 million worth of them.

In a recent interview, Bennett goes back to 1998. "We felt we were ahead of the curve," he says about touch screens. Board members were sure that the county could become a national model for implementing such voting systems, rectifying its history of election-day screw-ups in the process.

But he admits today that Diebold got the contract because of "a really good sales job."

"It was felt we were getting more, and we were promised more, by Diebold. And they were being aggressive in going after the business," he says. "And we thought at the time we'd get a better shot, [because] they were an Ohio company, down the street, they were close by, they were based in Canton, they told us all these things, they don't have to fly people in. We heard all these things."

It's unclear if legal counsel at the county or state levels understood the complexities of voting-equipment negotiations, or if they just ran out of time to adequately protect their clients. (The county's contractual process with Diebold took a year and a half to complete and the law firm of Benesch, Friedlander earned close to $100,000 of county dollars for its work.) In the end, neither the state nor county contracts with Diebold required reparations or damages in the event of failure. In a variety of scenarios, the final layer of accountability is only to fix problems, however long it takes. Few performance specifications are outlined, not even for the paper trail add-on, which the Cuyahoga board agreed to, sight unseen.

Coyne and Synenberg cite the board's failure to hire an "owner's rep" - a consultant versed in voting equipment - as perhaps the single largest mistake. Such a proposal was thwarted in 2003 when the board bickered over whether the Project Group, a business and political ally of Coyne's, could get the job.

"We wanted a project manager that would come and analyze the system, [to explain] "Here's what [vendors] can do, here's what they can't do,'" Coyne says. "Diebold, no one's held them to task on performance, because there's no specifications [in the contracts] that holds them accountable for that. It doesn't exist. And that's the whole weakness in this process. That's what we said from the very beginning."

When the Free Times asked Bennett if the contracts governing Diebold's touch-screen machines with the county, executed under his chairmanship, are lacking in any way, he pauses. (Bennett, Coyne and Synenberg still believe the touch screens can work - the glitches just need to be worked out.)

"Well, it's speculation, it's hindsight," he says about Diebold's contract. "I would've been happier with stronger penalties in there. Maybe I'd have been happier if it had spelled out the professional help we were going to get - in other words, the quality of the help, that you didn't hire people just for the election."

But there's little in the public record to indicate that any of the six companies that bid to become the board's representative was qualified to take on the mission of switching to new voting technology in the first place. And even when faced with evidence of Diebold's failures, the Cuyahoga board failed to hold the company adequately accountable. Nothing, it seems, was going to knock Diebold off the pedestal board members had placed it upon. So blinded were board members by the promise of cost-effective, near-perfect elections that the veteran lawyers and union representatives who sat on the Cuyahoga board never seriously considered how things might go wrong.

BACKGROUND

Rise Of The Machines: Ohio Takes The "Better Late Than Never' Approach To E-voting System Review

Welcome new machines (second item)

Numbers Game: The County and ACLU square off over the least unreliable form of voting